Last Friday, May 13, 61 undergraduate global health majors celebrated commencement with faculty and staff of the Duke Global Health Institute (DGHI). The ceremony was held in the Great Hall of the Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans Center for Health Education. In addition to the 61 majors, 63 minors and one global health certificate recipient graduated this year.
In his opening remarks, Michael Merson, director of DGHI, noted that the Duke undergraduate global health program was the first of its kind in the country. Merson told the students, “You’re at the forefront of an amazing and exciting field of study and work and you’re poised and have the knowledge and experience to make a meaningful impact.”
In his remarks, David Toole, director of undergraduate studies at DGHI, suggested that “global health is a state of mind.” Borrowing from David Foster Wallace’s 2005 now-famous commencement speech, he proposed that earning a degree or certificate in global health “has everything to do with an awareness of the water in which we are all swimming.” Toole noted that this year’s graduates conducted field research in 21 countries on five continents, including six U.S. states.
Toole Honors Graduates with Distinction and Capstone Award Winners
Toole recognized the ten global health undergraduates completed senior theses to graduate with distinction. (Click on the image below to learn more about these students and their projects.)
Learn more about these students and their thesis projects.
Toole also presented the annual capstone award. Through the capstone, the culminating experience for the Duke global health major, students work closely with a faculty mentor to apply analytical tools from coursework and fieldwork to address a specific global health problem and, at the end of the semester, present their project to faculty, staff and peers.
The winning team—Emily Gillespie, Lisa Guo, Jennifer (J.J.) Hayes and Maria Kohlbrenner—designed an intervention aimed at reducing preventable drug overdose deaths, decreasing both the burden on emergency services and the anxiety levels of friends and family members of drug users in Durham. The intervention centers around a wearable vital sign tracking device to connect patients and their families to emergency services in the event of an overdose and distribution of naloxone kits to families for use in rapid rescue response at home.
Eric Green Receives Undergraduate Professor of the Year Award
Eric Green, assistant professor of global health, was voted the undergraduate professor of the year. Among the many nominations submitted on his behalf, one of his students wrote, “Dr. Green pushes past the traditional classroom experience to create an environment that is conducive to original thought.” Another student commented, “Dr. Green has, more than any other professor I've seen, worked tirelessly to understand and improve the undergraduate student experience … He connects his students to real-world circumstances, and the opportunities that he generates in his capstone class are extraordinary.”
Student Speaker Suhani Jalota Embraced Entrepreneurship for Women’s Empowerment
This year’s undergraduate commencement speaker, global health and economics co-major Suhani Jalota, encouraged her classmates to respond to challenges by acting. “We see intolerable and infuriating disparities in global health, but if we feel helpless in the face of the massive challenges, we can get lost and not know what to do,” she said. “But it’s only real when you gather with others to make a difference. When you are on the field, talking to people, completely engaging yourself with them, the surroundings, and the diversity.”
She urged her fellow graduates to never stop trying, no matter how many failures they experience, because stopping “leaves no room for success at all.” And lastly, she challenged her classmates to constantly dream about the world they want to create. “For me,” she said, “I want our generation to create a world with less poverty and more beauty: a world where the common man is not compromised because of a fault in the system.”
Jalota, a Baldwin Scholar from India, actively sought out opportunities for social entrepreneurship and won several entrepreneurship competitions during her time at Duke. As a participant in the Melissa and Doug Entrepreneurs Program, she founded the Myna Mahila Foundation, a startup to produce low-cost, high-quality sanitary and medical pads while empowering women living in the slums of Mumbai to develop business skills, earn money and raise awareness about menstrual hygiene. She was recently named one of Glamour Magazine’s top 10 college women for her work on the Myna Mahila Foundation.
Jalota recently received the WomC Global Impact Award and the William J. Griffith University Service Award from the Duke Student Affairs office. This summer, Jalota, who graduated with a global health and economics co-major, will return to Mumbai to focus primarily on her foundation for a few months. In the fall, she’ll join the staff of IDinsight, where she’ll conduct impact evaluation research on economic development projects.
