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Date April 7, 2026
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Research showcase celebrates innovation, ideas from Brown public health students

National Public Health Week offered students at the Brown University School of Public Health the opportunity to discuss the impact of their research projects and learn about the work of others.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — On Tuesday, April 7, Brown University’s Alumnae Hall was abuzz with excited chatter about results, findings, methodology and impact, as part of the School of Public Health’s annual celebration of Public Health Research Day.

The festive poster conference is the premier event of National Public Health Week at Brown, showcasing the breadth and impact of student research and highlighting innovative work that is shaping the future of public health. Approximately 100 students presented, and awards for outstanding undergraduate, master’s and doctoral research posters will be announced at an April 16 event celebrating students, faculty and staff.

Here's what six School of Public Health students shared about their research experience this year:

Roya Barakzai

Class of 2026

Project: Your Healthcare Inside and Out: A Community-Informed Evaluation of a Digitized Reentry Health Guide

“I took the course PHP 1821: Incarceration, Disparities and Health, which showed me how awful health care is within the prisons and once people leave. After the class, I went to [adjunct assistant professor] Bradley Brockmann and said that I would love to do something to help, and he told me about ‘Your Health Care Inside and Out,’ a guidebook developed by public health students about 10 years ago that explains the health care system for individuals reentering society from incarceration. I then took PHP 1822, a Community-Based Learning and Research Course that involved applying what we’d learned, and we made a pamphlet of the guidebook.

“The guide has been edited over the years and for my honors thesis, I decided to test how it was perceived amongst reentry health care staff. What we found was that it was perceived to be usable, feasible and acceptable — overall, there were really positive reviews. We found an extra function of the guidebook, which wasn't intentional: that it could be used to train workers, as well. We did receive a few edits, which we're going to apply to the guidebook, and then we're going to start piloting the guide within reentry communities to see how it actually performs.” 

Kate Choi

Class of 2026

Project: Testing Legal Claims: Hospital Mergers and Acquisitions and Service Line Availability

“Over the past few years, the health care landscape in the United States has evolved in the sense that a lot of hospitals have been seeking consolidation as a measure to pursue financial growth as well as a general of expansion of services. But something that is unknown is whether these mergers and acquisitions actually help to maintain the services that the hospitals offer. In a literature review, I found that many studies focused on price effects of mergers and acquisitions; there weren’t many significant studies based on what the actual provision of services looked like afterwards.

“I want to pursue a career in health law in the future, and in the fall of my junior year, I did an Undergraduate Teaching and Research Awards project. That's how I got into quantitative studies related to health care consolidation. For this project, my honors thesis, I examined 175 service lines on the American Hospital Association dataset to look at what the difference is between hospitals that pursue mergers and acquisitions versus those that never did. The most consistent finding is that there was a lower probability of a hospital being able to maintain maternal health care services after mergers and acquisitions, which has significant implications for public health. I'm now looking at the sociological mechanism as to why this might be happening — there's definitely more to be studied.”

Safwan Islam

Class of 2026

Project: Exploring Occupational Health Risks Among Gas Station Workers in the United States

“My background with this project is that I have family members who work at a gas station. I won a fellowship that provided some funding for a research project, and I decided to implement that into my honor’s thesis. I had taken a class with [assistant professor] Erica Walker, who is involved with community engaged research projects, and I really wanted to work with her. Together, we created a pilot project exploring possible occupational health hazards for gas station workers. Then I did a literature review and saw that there's not much research on this subject. I created a survey and administered it to people at gas stations in the Providence area. It asked about the person’s health and also focused on three main exposures: stress, noise and smell/odor. I found that a lot of these factors are associated with one another: stress and noise, for example, were associated with negative health outcomes just based on correlation.

“There was so much information I discovered — around health care access, and diet quality and sleep quality for gas station workers. Even though I had a small sample size, this study provided me with data and direction for future projects. I envision myself improving the survey based on feedback as well as increasing my sample size. Eventually, I’d like to submit the research to a journal for publication.”

Peyton Luiz

Class of 2026, Master of Public Health

Project: An Agent-Based Model (ABM) of Influenza Transmission in a University Setting

“Prior to enrolling in the master of public health program, I worked at Brown as a project manager for a project that looked at pandemic prevention from a spatial and social mixing modeling perspective. I worked with my adviser to come up with a project to further this idea of indoor modeling of disease mixing and intervention. I was interested in applying a technique called agent-based modeling to see how it worked for disease transmission in indoor spaces, on a smaller scale than it's usually used. I've been working with BWell Health Promotion and thinking about health on campus, so the problem that I chose to look at was student flu vaccination and the spread of influenza on campus, where people who have different risk profiles and demographics are interacting at very high rates, and seeing what improving student vaccination rates looks like for the flu season and for the campus population.

“I've done more work since submitting this poster, and the research provides evidence of the potential effects of setting targets for student vaccination. I think it's something I’ll share with the people I work with in Student Health Services as a way of quantifying, in a rough sense, the impact that we can have with interventions that improve vaccine uptake and protect not just students but also faculty and staff.”

Jake Stevens

Class of 2026, Master of Public Health

Project: Hot and Dirty Air: The Joint Effects of Heat and Pollution on the Risk of Heart Failure Hospitalization in Older Adults

“I’ve always been interested in how climate and heat influence health. We're still trying to figure out what levels are bad, since a lot of the datasets have used models that look at the temperature at airports, even though most people don't live at an airport. So in this project we used a machine learning model created by [associate professor] Allan Just and colleagues to extrapolate from those airport monitors, and estimate, at different points, what is the temperature and the pollution average of those days. We matched that to a national Medicare dataset, and we have about 45 million data point observations. Our goal is to build this model into trying to form heat warning systems. It may not get that hot during the day, but if the pollution level — fine particulate matter — is elevated, people could be at risk for heat-related injuries, heart failure or heart attack.

“In my master of public health thesis, I’m focusing on causal inference epidemiology and trying to look at how we can use observational datasets to make policies that protect our health as the climate is changing. I came to Brown with this interest, and I saw that faculty members like Allan Just and Corwin Zigler — now the reader for my thesis — are doing exciting research in this area. It’s been awesome to work with them and learn from them.”

Haiyue Song

Ph.D. Candidate in Biostatistics

Project: Causal Inference for Unobservable Multivariate Outcomes with Applications to Brain Effective Connectivity

“We are trying to do a causal inference of the treatment — or intervention — effect on the brain communication network, especially for Alzheimer's disease or other types of dementia. We cannot observe the brain communication network directly, so we need to estimate or derive information from neuroimaging taken from patients. We’re trying to estimate how medication affects the pathway from region to region in the brain. The basic idea is that there is some relationship between different components, and we are interested in the effect of an external intervention on those relationships. We’re trying to develop a methodology, which could be applied to other situations besides Alzheimer’s, and then we’d like to eventually submit it to a statistics journal.

“I was doing similar research throughout undergrad, but in relation to the stock market. I found that I could apply similar approach to investigate how different brain regions affect each other. There are similarities in how we can look at the time series of stock prices and how we look at functional MRI data, which I explored in during my master’s in biostatistics at Brown, and I’m building upon that in my Ph.D. research.”

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Research School of Public Health Undergraduate Research

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