Symposium analyzes East Asian public health

Speakers at the annual Public Health in Asia Symposium, themed “Growing Burdens: Persistent and Emerging Health Issues in Asia,” shared their viewpoints on topics ranging from environmental pollution to nutritional deficiencies. The symposium was held on Saturday in Gilman 50 as a collaboration between the East Asian Studies Program, the International Studies Program, the Anthropology Department, the History of Medicine Department and the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“We need a better understanding of manifestations and causes of health inequity in all its complexity,” Dr. David Peters, chair of the department of international health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health and a keynote speaker, said.

The symposium was broken up into various parts, with three keynote speakers in the morning followed by a catered lunch and various presentations of student research in the afternoon.

Junior Danny Dong-Hyun Jeon, one of the primary coordinators of the event, said that the symposium is centered around providing a platform for students to share their research regarding health issues in Asia with each others, and receive feedback from professors and peers. He added that the program was started in 2013 by the director of East Asian Studies, Erin Chung, who had this specific goal in mind.

This year there were a total of nine undergraduate and graduate student presenters. The research presentations were followed by a panel led by various professors. The presenters then received feedback from both faculty and the audience.

“The whole idea is to generate discussion between professors and students,” Jeon said. “We have a really close relationship to the Bloomberg school of Public Health and the symposium. It’s a great way to link undergraduate and graduate students. The exchange of viewpoints is what we hope to achieve.”

Sophomore Karina Ikeda, another student organizer of the event, echoed Jeon. Ikeda said that many people in the Hopkins community are interested in trends and developments of healthcare and healthcare policy in Asia.

“This symposium was organized after considering the large public health undergraduate population here at Hopkins and with our close ties to the Bloomberg School of Public Health,” Ikeda said. “By bringing the focus specifically to Asia, we wanted to have a poignant discussion about the issues that are plaguing this generation.”

Both Ikeda and Jeon were pleased with the turnout of the event, especially the diversity of representation of individuals from the undergraduate campus, the Bloomberg School of Public Health, as well as from the community.

Zhengchung Jiang, a public health graduate student, said she found out about the event through her professors and was eager to come to listen to the various speakers and student presentations.

“I really enjoyed the first speaker, Harvard Professor Dr. Frank Hu, for his study that combines history data and events in China to related current disease patterns,” Jiang said. “His investigation about the association between the big famine, the cultural revolution and current states in China was a topic I had never heard about before.”

Jeon hopes that the students who participated this year were able to be challenged by each other and by the various speakers and panelists. He looks forward to an even bigger turnout for next year’s symposium, which will be held in February.

“In the future we want to have a very interdisciplinary approach,” Jeon said. “Public health itself is such an interdisciplinary major and we want to incorporate as many students as possible from other related majors like International Studies and East Asian Studies.”