Student competition addresses Haiti earthquake public health issues

Nine teams of students prepared competing 25-minute poster presentations highlighting issues pertaining to the Haiti earthquake disaster and resulting public health crises. Each team comprised members from a wide range of disciplines at UNC.

Winning team members include (front, l-r) Jacqueline Regan and Benning Wang; and (back row, l-r) Janki Ghodasara (ESE), Mindy Nichamin, Christina Mayer and Chirag Rajpuria (HPM).

The winning team members included two undergraduate students from the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health: Chirag Rajpuria, a senior in the Department of Health Policy and Management and Janki Ghodasara, a senior in the Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering. Their teammates were Mindy Nichamin, a senior in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Christina Mayer, a third year professional in the School of Pharmacy, Benning Wang, a first year professional of the Kenan-Flagler Business School and Jacqueline Regan, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Their presentation, “Building a Life Worth Living: Sustainable Access to Health Care Services in Post-Earthquake Haiti,” proposed building a sustainable children’s rehabilitation center in Port-au-Prince to provide services, training and prosthetic products for child amputees.

The UNC Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases provided mentors and guidance for the competition. A student committee led the event. Initially, one team of students planned to develop a case study to compete directly in the Southeast regional level of the case competition, hosted by Emory University. Instead, they decided to host a UNC case challenge, with the winning team competing in the Southeast regional event. The student committee helped facilitate the process of assembling the student teams, filling out partial self-fulfilled teams and otherwise working to make sure the team contained a diverse mix of students from different disciplines.

A “Young Professionals in Global Health Job Fair/Networking Opportunity” will follow the event on Thursday, April 15 at the North Carolina Biotechnology Center.

Judges included:

• Rumay Alexander, MSN, EdD, clinical professor in the UNC School of Nursing and director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs,
• Rebecca Kohler, MPH, vice president for strategic development and communications at IntraHealth International,
• Donald A. Holzworth, MS, chairman of the Futures Group and executive in residence at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health,
• Dan Jones, fire chief for the Town of Chapel Hill,
• Benjamin Mason Meier, PhD, JD, LLM, assistant professor of global health policy at UNC,
• Rick Mumford, MPH, DMD, director of the Dentistry in Service to Communities (DISC) program, clinical associate professor in the Department of Dental Ecology at the UNC School of Dentistry,
• Michael Roach, PhD, assistant professor of strategy and entrepeneuriship at UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, and
• Richard S. Sayer, JD, associate professor of law and adjunct associate professor of social medicine at the UNC School of Medicine and UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health.

The Futures Group, Delta Omega, the UNC Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases, and the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School’s MBA Health Care Club sponsored the event.

UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health contact: Ramona DuBose, director of communications, (919) 966-7467 or ramona_dubose@unc.edu.