In this special commencement-season episode of Humans in Public Health, host Megan Hall welcomes Campbell Loi and Graham Huntington, two freshly minted graduates of Brown University’s intensive 5-year combined undergraduate/MPH program.

As they transition from the classroom to professional practice in 2026, they reflect on the academic experiences and practical training that have shaped their careers — including Graham's background as an EMT— and that have shaped their commitment to global health.

Here in Providence, Rhode Island, the month of May means commencement season. Classes are ending, students are taking pictures in their caps and gowns and parents are flying into town for the big day.

And at Brown's School of Public Health, it means a new group of students are about to graduate: Going from public health student to public health professional.

[00:01:03] Megan Hall: Campbell and Graham, thank you so much for joining me today.

[00:01:06] Campbell Loi: Thanks for having us.

[00:01:19] Megan Hall: Can you tell me when the two of you met, like, when your kind of like journey together as public health people started?

[00:01:37] Graham Huntington: Sprint together!

[00:01:41] Megan Hall: They'd have to run, from one part of Brown's campus, on top of college hill, to the school of public health building, all the way at the bottom of the hill.

[00:01:51] Campbell Loi: Sometimes less.

[00:02:05] Campbell Loi: Those simulations were hard.

[00:02:08] Campbell Loi: there was one simulation I can remember where Dr. Levine had us come in. he was like, "Okay, this is how many people are at your camp. This is how many people are displaced. You need to build latrines this far apart. You knew the ratio of, like, tents to people, and you had to just figure out how to do it all, where to put everything, where to put, medical tents, how far apart to space them, and then, calculate how much money it was all gonna be, in like 45 minutes

[00:02:35] Graham Huntington: Dr. Levine was always understanding, though.

[00:02:40] Megan Hall: At this point, both Campbell and Graham were taking public health classes as undergrads, but they weren't in the School of Public Health's 5th year masters program, not yet.

[00:03:00] Megan Hall: But they kept taking public health classes - and every semester it was their favorite class, and so they both decided to apply to the program again, this time, with a clearer sense of what they wanted to study, and why they wanted to study it.

[00:03:16] Campbell Loi: It was electric.[00:03:33] Megan Hall: So when did both of you get the bug for public health? Like, why did you decide to study this in the first place?

I was very much on the politics, track. but before I got to Brown, I started working EMS, on an ambulance,

and then I got confused. I was like, "Well, I really like the healthcare field. But I'm more of a humanities guy." Uh, it wasn't until I actually met with Dr. Levine, who taught the, the course we were just talking about.

Um, it wasn't until I met Dr. Levine and spoke with him that I really was introduced to the field of public health, and he was like, "Well, this is a really good in between."

[00:04:19] Graham Huntington: So I'm from Vermont, and my grandparents did EMS, and then I started EMS, I think maybe six years ago. Then soon after, my mom followed, and then my brother did as well. And yeah, so we work together back home in Vermont, My mom and I both do first response, so that means, um...

Just 'cause Vermont is a, like, rural state, and it takes a while for the ambulance to get to different places, first response means that, if a call goes out, I hear on my pager and my radio and stuff, and I get in my car, and I turn my lights on, and I say, "Mom, get in the car."

And we go to, you know, we go to whatever it is, and then the ambulance shows up 10 minutes later, and so we just do a little bit of care first. So we do that together, and then I work on the ambulance both in Vermont and here in Rhode Island.

[00:05:07] Campbell Loi: so my mom's a physician, but she actually studied public health undergrad, and I remember her telling me about it as something that I might enjoy, back in high school.

And there was a first year seminar at Brown, I think it was called Complexities and Challenges of Global Health. It was with Dr. Nisha Trivedi. She was great. I learned so much about global health there. I took Intro after that, and I just kept really enjoying everything. I just kept going, and now here I am.

[00:05:39] Campbell Loi: Oh, it's weird.

[00:05:47] Campbell Loi: I very vividly remember that day that I think we were on Zoom for biostats for some reason, but we were midway through our final projects. This is a full year course, where we're using publicly available datasets, and all of a sudden, all of those datasets had been taken down. it felt so dystopian, truly. I- I really remember it so vividly."

And our professor is like, "Well, I've downloaded as much as I can," and, you know, everybody at the School of Public Health is, you know, downloading datasets. And that's just one example.

[00:06:42] Campbell Loi: I went to a conference for the Consortium for Global Health, CUGH, a couple weeks ago, and I think hearing from so many people doing amazing work in the field despite everything that's going on was really inspiring, especially, like, right now looking for jobs, it's easy to get down about how bad everything is. But having that convening of so many great minds in the field was really inspiring to me and helpful in motivating me to push on. And really just at Brown School of Public Health, everyone's doing such cool and important work. my professors have been so helpful and, engaging, inspiring.

[00:07:21] Graham Huntington: Yeah. I think, I think two things. I mean, first of all, a lot of people at the School of Public Health or any sort of public health institution or agency department do their research, their funding is getting cut, and still they're, they're showing up, right?

We had professors every day that would, you know, come in and have lost a big grant or had, some big hit to one of their initiatives, but are still, coming in to teach us and still Working just as hard

I think the other thing for me is that, I think like, certainly not good what's happening, right? but especially in the global health, global health field, at least that's more what I'm familiar with, there's just been a lot of talk about like sort of a reset and

o- o- obviously with any, with any part of public health, but especially global health, there are, you know, there are a lot of issues with the status quo.

I talk to people, and they talk about, you know, how to rebuild. you know, you don't wanna rebuild the same, the structure that failed so easily or that has, in some cases perpetrated a lot of harm. and instead they're talking about how to, make it more equitable, more localized, more, more impactful, and I think that's really cool.

[00:08:30] Graham Huntington: I did my thesis on humanitarian trauma response in Haiti. In the humanitarian sector, there are trauma systems with, you know, how to get patients from where they're injured to definitive care.

And I looked at how you can apply some of those existing models and adapt them for implementation in Haiti, where the dynamics are just far more complicated with so many more armed actors and more sporadic, though still very intense, violence.

Those are not necessarily traditional, public health determinants that we think of, in, like, the normal public health sector, but, have obviously huge im-impacts on population health and, you know, individual health, but also just how you conduct any kind of, you know, health intervention or, like, health systems improvement in that sort of conflict-afflicted setting.

[00:09:20] Campbell Loi: Yeah. So my thesis, it focused on humanitarian medical and public health response in Sudan during their current conflict, which began in 2023.

I felt like it was a really important setting to research that doesn't often get talked about in mainstream media. And doing my literature reviews, I felt like there wasn't even a lot of academic research on the topic.

So yeah, it started off as my capstone project and it kind of carried through just because I felt so inspired and motivated to shed light on this particular conflict.

[00:10:10] Graham Huntington: They have a health profession school in Boston. and yeah, I start there in September, and it's about a three-year program.

[00:10:26] Graham Huntington: I think, first of all- There are some very practical, more technical skills, such as biostatistics and epidemiology and, you know, being able to do some coding in R or Stata and, and stuff like that.

I also think, you know, there's a language in public health, right? And learning how to speak that language and understand it was incredibly important. But I think what Brown does well is learning how to communicate that to, like, a lay audience or patients or whoever you're working with in the community, was super important as well for me.

[00:11:27] Megan Hall: I'm having flashbacks because my MPH thesis was qualitative.

[00:11:31] Megan Hall: And I used NVivo and run focus groups.

but yeah, definitely rewarding. Like, I'm so glad that I did a thesis, but it was, it took up a lot of my year, for sure.

[00:11:55] Campbell Loi: Well, and like iterate it like multiple, multiple rounds of coding too, to make sure that everything's like aligned and, that you're not missing things across so many different interviews. but I think my thesis also really cemented that skill for me, um, doing it completely- on my own, like my first solo project. That was huge.

[00:12:20] Graham Huntington: So having spent the last however many years at Brown studying public health, it'll be nice to actually get to use some of those skills and, start working in public health, like full-time, and so that's pretty exciting.

I'm trying not to quote the learning public health by doing public health that the School of Public Health pushes so much, but, but it's true.

I will miss, like- the ability to, like, absorb new information every day. I know I'll, like, still learn with a job, but being a student is so different.

And yeah, the freedom that we have to learn, like, literally whatever we want at Brown has been really awesome as well, and I think that that's unique to this school.

it's a very interdisciplinary school, that has allowed to, allowed me to explore a lot of different niches of different, parts of public health, for which I am very grateful.

And congratulations on graduating and moving on to the next chapter.

[00:13:32] Graham Huntington: Thank you. Yeah. Been a long time coming.

Humans in Public Health is a monthly podcast brought to you by Brown University School of Public Health. This episode was produced by Nat Hardy and recorded at the podcast studio at CIC Providence.

I'm Megan Hall. Talk to you next month!