For 10 weeks this summer, Luisa Fernandez and Shannon Yurcich put their public health training into practice at the Allegheny County Health Department (ACHD). By summer's end, each had discovered an unexpected passion. Fernandez found herself drawn to data analytics and infectious disease, while Yurcich discovered an interest in maternal and child health.
The two epidemiology students were among nine graduate students participating in this year's Pittsburgh Summer Institute (PSI), a long-standing partnership between the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health and ACHD. Now celebrating its 15th year, the 200-hour practicum places students with experienced mentors at the health department, where they contribute to projects addressing community health challenges while exploring careers in governmental public health.
For Adrianna Gradisek, experiential learning specialist at Pitt Public Health who coordinates the program, that's exactly what the PSI is designed to do.
"This program allows our students to experience public health practice in real time," she said. "By working on projects that make a difference in our community, they gain firsthand experience across the many disciplines of public health and see how those fields work together to improve health."
At ACHD, students spend the summer working alongside experienced public health professionals, said Michele Poindexter, a member of the department's Workforce Development team who led the health department's coordination of the Pittsburgh Summer Institute for the first time this year. The department also used the showcase to highlight its Community Health Assessment and encourage community participation.
"It's been exciting to see students become part of our teams," Poindexter said. "Each student is paired with a preceptor, and we meet with them at the beginning of the summer to help them understand how the health department works."
This year's participants worked with teams focused on infectious disease surveillance, vector control, overdose prevention and harm reduction, healthy aging, maternal and infant health and other public health priorities.
Fernandez came to the program hoping to expand her experience beyond chronic disease epidemiology.
"I really wanted to learn more about infectious diseases because COVID showed us we still have to pay attention to them," she said.
Working with county data, Fernandez analyzed disparities in COVID-19 mortality while learning R, the open-source programming language increasingly used in public health research and practice.
"I am definitely more interested in the data analysis side of epidemiology now," Fernandez said. "I didn't go into public health thinking that. This experience made me more comfortable working with available datasets."
Yurcich spent the summer with ACHD's birth surveillance program, helping convert code from SAS to R as the department transitions to the open-source software. Her work supports the county's public dashboard, which reports maternal and infant health indicators, including birth outcomes, maternal smoking and pregnancy complications.
"In a lot of our classes, we get practice datasets," she said. "Here, I was working with data that actually gets reported out to people like me."
As a lifelong Allegheny County resident, Yurcich said seeing how local data is used to inform decisions in her own community made the experience especially meaningful.
Students wrapped up the summer by presenting their projects during a showcase at Pitt Public Health, highlighting both the breadth of their work and what they learned during the practicum.
For Renee Valenti, the school's director of educational programs & accreditation initiatives, partnerships like the PSI are about more than completing a required practicum.
"These practicum placements help students build the knowledge, confidence and professional skills they'll carry into the public health workforce," she said. "Experiences like this strengthen both our students and the communities they'll go on to serve."
This year's participants represented multiple departments across Pitt Public Health, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of public health. They include:
Emma Doonan, Epidemiology
Luisa Fernandez, Epidemiology
Emma Gurley, Infectious Diseases and Microbiology
Lucielle Koch, Behavioral and Community Health Sciences
Kelly Pawlak, Infectious Diseases and Microbiology
Sabina Shah, Health Policy and Management
Johnae Walker, Epidemiology
Marilyn Warren, Health Policy and Management
Shannon Yurcich, Epidemiology
-Clare Collins