Alice Wang: Solving the puzzle makes public health fun
May 27, 2016
Dr. Alice Wang (left) shows a young woman in Mwanza, Tanzania, how to use a portable test for drinking water quality. (Contributed photo)
Alice Wang, PhD, has a great elevator speech.
“Have you seen the movie Contagion?” she asks. “Kate Winslet’s character was an epidemic intelligence service officer — that’s what I do!”
Wang, who graduated from the Gillings School’s environmental sciences and engineering program in May 2015, began working for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that July. Her position is a two-year fellowship with a focus on applied epidemiology.
Her placement on the CDC’s disaster epidemiology and response team, part of the health studies branch of the National Center for Environmental Health, has afforded Wang the opportunity to engage with a variety of different projects and enhance her statistical analysis system (SAS) and geographical information system (GIS) skills.
On her latest international deployment, Wang traveled to Tanzania to help with cholera outbreak response. She spent two weeks in Dar es Salaam, working with the Ministry of Health and nonprofit partners to develop a water, sanitation and hygiene plan for rapid-response teams to share with local health offices.
Wang also traveled to the city of Mwanza for two weeks and visited households and cholera treatment centers to ensure that prevention and control measures were in place.
“A lot of what we did is common sense,” she explains, “but when limited by resources, hindered by politics and bogged down by logistics, the simplest tasks become challenges. Solving that puzzle is what makes public health fun.”
Most recently, the CDC deployed Wang to Flint, Mich., as part of the water response. “Responding to public health crises in our own country is very important, too,” she says.
This story originally was published in the Spring 2016 edition of Carolina Public Health Magazine.
Gillings School of Global Public Health contact: David Pesci, director of communications, (919) 962-2600 or dpesci@unc.edu
