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The 2023 Minorities in Health Conference was held on the 16th of April this year. Since 2009, this annual student-led event holds the primary purpose of educating students about health disparities that impact our communities and finding ways to decrease these disparities by encouraging and inspiring primarily high school and undergraduate students to strive toward higher education and, ultimately, careers in health. Organized by the Minorities in Health (MIH) Planning Committee, this was the first fully in-person conference since 2019.

Soniya Manju is a first-year MPH student at UC Berkeley in the Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Health (MCAH) Program. She completed her undergraduate degree in Public Health at UC Irvine with a minor in Medical Anthropology. With a passion for reducing health disparities among communities of color, Soniya is exploring her many interests within the MCAH field, including childhood development, child mental health, maternal mortality, and reproductive health.

Students featured in this section are graduating seniors in our first cohort of Advanced LEAP Scholars. Read below to learn more about Bryana, Gurashish and Julia's experiences!

Images created by Grace Rajan, MCAH LEAP Peer Ambassador 2022-23.

I started my public health career at the Sacramento County Department of Health Services as a Health Education Assistant in their Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health (MCAH) Department. Intrigued by the endlessly fascinating work of the county epidemiologists, I decided to pursue an MPH at UC Berkeley in the MCAH concentration (formerly MCH).

Tell us about yourself and your current role.

Alumna Kimsa Nguyen (MPH ‘22) recently presented a poster of her MCAH master’s capstone project, "Association Between Acculturation and Birth Control Usage Among Asian American Women in California," at the Asian Pacific American Medical Students Association (APAMSA) National Conference. This year the conference was hosted at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, Oregon.

A team of researchers, led by Julia Acker, a doctoral student at UC Berkeley School of Public Health, Division of Epidemiology, sought to determine whether differences in racial and economic privilege at the neighborhood level may contribute to these disparities. 

As the semester comes to an end, we are highlighting two of our Advanced LEAP Scholars who are graduating in December 2022: Gabriel Sumayan Garcia and Kennedy Schaffer! They have been an integral part of our first cohort of Advanced LEAP Scholars at Berkeley Public Health, and we are excited to see their growth beyond Berkeley.  Read below to learn more about their experience in the MCAH LEAP Training Program.