All of the students featured in this section are graduating seniors who are a part of our first cohort of Advanced LEAP Scholars. Read below to learn more about Casey, Crystal, and Ainsley's undergraduate experiences at UC Berkeley!
Images created by Grace Rajan, MCAH LEAP Peer Ambassador 2022-23
Casey Dai
Majors: Public Health and Molecular Environmental Biology
Through her LEAP summer internship, Casey did research with the STEER Program. In addition to independent research, the STEER apparatus included a weekly circuit of lectures from experts and academics from UC Berkeley and UCSF, as well as team-based learning with the rest of her summer cohort.
She was matched with Dr. Ajay Pillarisetti, a professor of Environmental Health Sciences at UC Berkeley focusing on the impacts of energy use—typically at the household level—on air pollution exposure, health, and climate change. For her research project, Casey looked at ambient air quality data pulled from a large RCT run out of Emory University evaluating the impacts of a clean fuel intervention on exposures and health outcomes throughout and after pregnancy in rural Guatemala, India, Peru, and Rwanda.
"Lifecourse and social determinants of health have been constant threads through the work I’ve done, at both my internship and fellowship experiences. From following women pre-pregnancy through 18-months of critical developmental periods in postpartum mothers to reading thousands of papers on women’s empowerment, life course theory and SDOHs have always been close at hand. I’ve gained a better appreciation of how an intersectional understanding of the social determinants of health can elucidate why and how some empowerment programs fall short of their desired outcomes, and why others are successful. Life course is the implicit theory behind much of HAPIN — after all, we understand that maternal health begins far before pregnancy, and long after."
Casey believes that her STEER research experience gave her the tools, knowledge, and confidence to ask more and better questions. She’s continued asking questions, and the preliminary household air pollution exposure assessment analysis she started over the summer has transformed into the backbone for her senior honors thesis.
For her research fellowship, Casey worked with Drs. Isha Ray and Gauthami Penakalapati trying to understand how the global development sector has been “empowering” women and girls to achieve global equity. Empowerment measures are a popular and valuable tool for evaluating women and girls programming. However, measuring an individual’s empowerment is elusive because it lacks a biological or phenological manifestation. This past summer, they reviewed the titles and abstracts of over 30,000 peer-reviewed papers to extract data from a subset of these papers in the next few months.
Crystal Htwe
Major: Public Health
Crystal’s passion for public health was shaped by the communities she comes from. As a Burmese immigrant, she personally experienced the disconnect that can occur between healthcare providers and their patients due to language barriers, and realized that healthcare wasn’t truly accessible for communities like hers.
She wanted to continue serving communities like hers while at university, which shaped the extracurriculars she chose to actively engage in. Ever since her freshman year, Crystal has focused her efforts towards community retention and wellness at REACH!– the Asian & Asian-American Diaspora Retention and Recruitment Center at UC Berkeley–and its greater bridges Multicultural Resource Coalition. The students she works with are primarily first-generation, low-income students from underrepresented and underserved communities, where systemic inequities disproportionately affect their access to healthcare. This is where she realized that the retention and recruitment of students of color are both inherently political and deeply intertwined with community health outcomes. Currently, she serves as the Executive Director of Internal Affairs for REACH! and works directly with the professional staff of UC Berkeley in the Office of the Chancellor, Division of Student Affairs, and Office of Diversity, Equity Inclusion & Belonging to advocate for students of color on the UC Berkeley campus.
Crystal also volunteers for Suitcase Clinic–a student-run free clinic that primarily serves the local unhoused community in the East Bay–where she first discovered her passion for maternal and child health during her time as Children’s Coordinator for their Women’s and Children’s Clinic. Throughout her conversations with different clinic-goers, she noticed common themes and came to the realization that housing justice was also linked to reproductive justice.
"If these women had the resources to gain ownership of their reproductive healthcare like their more privileged counterparts, would their lives and the lives of their children differ from how they are now? I argue that it would have, for the fight for reproductive justice is about gaining access to choice, yet all of the women I talked to never had one."
Through her involvement with LEAP, Crystal became an intern for Beyond the Pill–a program under the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at UCSF–under the guidance of Drs. Cynthia Harper and Alison Comfort. There, she assisted in developing a series of educational tools centered around birth control that will eventually be launched for nationwide usage and a community advisory board with a panel of leading reproductive healthcare professionals that will be implemented at local community colleges in the coming months.
Ainsley Torres
Majors: Public Health and Integrative Biology
Ainsley loves her experience as a LEAP scholar and is very inspired by the supportive community the scholars have all built due to their shared passion. Her family inspired her curiosity for public health, which is why she is interested in looking at health–especially reproductive health–from a culturally sensitive perspective.
She has volunteered at the Mabuhay Health Center, a free clinic in San Francisco that serves the Filipino-American population, which reaffirmed to her the importance of culturally sensitive care in making access to health information accessible and understandable. Last year, Ainsley was also one of the Minorities in Health Conference coordinators, representing the Pilipino Association for Health Careers (PAHC), where she worked with several other pre-health minority organizations on the UC Berkeley campus to organize an annual conference for underrepresented communities in health and medicine. This experience taught her the importance of working together to learn from, make space for, and support one another to overcome barriers in health and medicine.
"LEAP has provided me with learning opportunities that have reaffirmed my interest in MCAH and Public Health, helped me to explore what I’m interested in to narrow down my focus a little, and provided me with mentors and peers to help guide me."
Last spring, she worked with Dr. Kim Harley to research more about predictors of menstrual cycle characters in adolescents. She was interested in seeing how data from Clue–a menstrual tracking phone application–can be used to investigate health outcomes in public health research and also learn about the project’s background. This past summer, Ainsley also did two internships with LEAP affiliates. With the Asian Health Services Youth Program (AHSYP), she planned and coordinated the Bridging Generations x Leaders in Training Program together with fellow LEAP scholar Gabriel. She also worked for UCSF’s Beyond the Pill research program with fellow LEAP scholar Crystal, where they conducted interviews with participants to analyze the effectiveness of birth control education materials among adolescents.
In the future, Ainsley hopes to explore how to bridge the gap between public health and medicine to work with communities to address health disparities and understand health intergenerationally within a family context.