Public Health

Student Profiles

Literature and public health come together around Africans’ personal stories
"Hands-on work in the field of psychology"
Engineering student explores health care systems for the digital age
Inside an epidemiology laboratory
Psychology major joins laboratory to study eating disorders

(See overview page for important information on profiles and lists.)

Literature and public health come together around Africans’ personal stories

Name: Suzanne W.
Undergraduate major field(s): Literature, Biology (pre-med)
Goals for her Paris Field Study semester: Perfect her spoken French and figure out if her public health was really what she wanted to pursue after college.
Placement: URACA - NGO for and by Paris African communities focusing on public health and culture
Responsibilities as intern:

Assist groups of women prepare action plans for AIDS prevention activities.

Draft synthetic report of women’s groups’ actions carried out.

Respond to incoming phone calls, receive visitors, perform translations, help with visa formalities for the US.

Distribute meals to hospitalized members of the URACA community.

Participate in recording oral history of African patients speaking about AIDS.
Subject of research: Personal stories and AIDS: Discourse analysis of twenty-one African AIDS patients in France talking about their disease.
And... "Not only can I now hold a conversation in French without pantomime but I’m sure about my public health choice and maybe want to focus on women’s health after seeing the positive effects URACA has had on the community."

"Hands-on work in the field of psychology"

Name: Anna R.
Undergraduate major field(s): Psychology and French Studies
Goals for her Field Study semester: “To ameliorate my formal French writing skills and to learn more about how to help mentally disturbed individuals through hands-on work in the field of psychology.”
Placement: Henri Mondor Hospital Psychiatry Department
Responsibilities as intern:

Participate in different aspects of life in the clinic; attend meetings, accompany a doctor in his clinical activities, observe patients

Assist in care of a patient; observe sessions with bipolar patients

Engage in research and analysis of data
Subject of research: Using Behavioral and Cognitive Theory with Bipolar Patients Suffering from Extreme Anxiety
And... After IFE, Anna used her experience both in an internship at Massachusetts General Hospital working on behavioral disorders and in translating and directing the physiologically complex characters of Koltès’s Roberto Zucco.

Engineering student explores health care systems for the digital age

Name: Stephanie G.
Undergraduate major field(s): Industrial Engineering
Goals for her Field Study semester: : Streamline her professional interests by exploring healthcare IT.
Placement: GIP- DMP (French ministry of health- public task force for personal digital medical file)
Responsibilities as intern:

Design a matrix that defines conditions of access to the different types of documents that are contained in a patient’s digital medical file, according to the field of competence and responsibility of each healthcare professional

Help organize working groups with various stakeholders and a national consortium of physicians, pharmacists, and clinicians.

Work closely with DMP’s medical advisor and other members of the team, collecting data and analyzing results of ongoing work sessions

Research the interoperability of health information systems (like the DMP)
Subject of research: The Personal Digital Medical File (DMP) as a Response to the Need for National Strategy and for Greater Interoperability
And... Stephanie continues to work in the field as an application analyst in clinical information systems at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

Inside an epidemiology laboratory

Name: Sydney F.
Undergraduate major field(s): Anthropology with a concentration on Communities and Public Health
Goals for her Field Study semester: “To gain strong experience working with public health professionals and be involved in a public health issue/Expand my knowledge of career options in public health.”
Placement: Laboratory specializing in mathematical modeling applied to epidemiology
Responsibilities as intern:

Launch classic research protocol on the effect of asthma crises on medicine overall, completing a bibliographic survey of the topic and synthesizing the current findings

Treat data collected by laboratory since 2002, present findings and analyses to committee of experts.

Participate in team meetings and seminars
Subject of research: A Study of Asthma Cases Treated by General Practitioners in France
And... Parallel to her research paper, Sydney wrote a scientific article on her research and submitted it to a medical journal for publication.

Psychology major joins laboratory to study eating disorders

Name: Sarah B.
Undergraduate major field(s): Psychology, French
Goals for her Paris Field Study semester: Combine French studies and Psychology major by learning first-hand about mental health care delivery in France.
Placement: Research assistant in the Social Psychology Laboratory of EHESS (Institute for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences)
Responsibilities as intern:

Assist research team in carrying out a study of eating behavior.

Contribute to ongoing research projects related to minority groups.

Assist in the preparation of scientific articles in English.

Participate in the scientific life of the Institute including seminars, colloquia, etc.
Subject of research: Obesity prevention in France focusing on normative and cognitive influences on food behavior.
And... Sarah arrived in the laboratory just as a study of obesity was being organized, and she was given responsibilities for initial documentary research, designing the survey tool, and assisting in conducting the interviews that were the basis of this research project.