Student Profiles

Dayo Spencer-Walters found herself inspired by her professors in the MPH program at the Fielding School Department of Community Health Sciences. “They were so passionate about what they were doing,” Spencer-Walters says, “and they all had extensive practical experience in the field, which helped to contextualize what they were teaching.”

When Courtney Coles was growing up in Austin, Texas, she sensed something was amiss with her family’s response to her great-grandmother’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. “They didn’t really understand what it meant,” Coles says. “They said we should just pray about it and she would get better, rather than focusing on facilities or therapies that might be helpful.”

While in high school, Annie Fehrenbacher worked at Planned Parenthood as a peer educator. “It was my reaction to the information we were getting at school during a big push for abstinence-only education,” she says. “I felt we weren’t being informed about our own health.”

More than many graduate students, Eli Tomar has spent enough time in the thick of the policy-making process on Capitol hill to know the challenges – and in many cases, frustrations – of passing meaningful health-related legislation.