Doctoral Student Profiles
Mackenzie Adams, MPH, is a doctoral student in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education
at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and a Rackham Merit Fellow.
Her research interests include understanding and mitigating the factors that influence
substance use and adverse mental health outcomes in adolescents.
Amanda Ajrouche, MSW, is a doctoral student and Rackham Merit Fellow in the Department of Health Behavior
and Health Equity at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Her research
examines how racialization, social stigma, and discrimination shape the health and
wellbeing of Arab American communities. Drawing on more than six years of experience
in community nonprofit and research organizations, she integrates community-engaged
and equity-centered approaches to promote culturally responsive public health research.
Odalys Arbelaez, MA, is a doctoral student and Rackham Merit Fellow in the Department of Health Behavior
and Health Equity. Her research interests broadly focus on firearm injury prevention
efforts to mitigate firearm-related harms among young children and adolescents. She
is interested in understanding how to improve engagement and communication with parents
of young children around the issue of secure storage to reduce unintentional firearm
injuries
Jessica Bishai, MS, is a doctoral student in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Equity.
She is interested in how improvements in the built environment affect neighborhood
violence, and especially in how social infrastructure may moderate the relationship
between excess heat and violence. In her research, she leverages community-based participatory
research methods, spatio-temporal quantitative analyses, and causal inference. Prior
to her PhD program, she worked at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation
on maternal, neonatal, and child health metrics for the Global Burden of Disease project.
Victoria Davis MS, is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Equity
at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Her research examines how interactions
across policy, healthcare, and social service systems shape health, with a focus on
chronic conditions. She studies how healthcare and community-based organizations address
housing and related social needs, and the policies that influence these efforts. Victoria
is especially interested in the structural drivers of housing inequities, their implications
for chronic conditions, and community-engaged approaches to research.
Koya Ferrell is a Doctoral student in the School of Public Health in the Department of Health Behavior
and Health Education. Her research interest includes the impact of racial stress and
trauma on healthcare engagement and ways to improve patient-provider relationships
and quality of care delivery through physician training centered around anti-racism
and dismantling structural and institutional inequity. She holds a masters degree
in Physiology and Biophysics and previously served as a research trainee at the National
Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities at the National Institutes of
Health. During her doctoral studies, she hopes to bring together her past clinical
care experience with her current studies in community health and community-based participatory
research to better understand and improve preventive medicine services, specifically
for Black communities.
Noelle E. Kellogg MPH is a doctoral student in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education
and a Rackham Merit Fellow. Her research interests include using community-engaged
approaches to better understand and address the health effects of intersectional stigma,
particularly among youth and LGBTQ+ people.
Sophia Kiselova is a doctoral student in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education and
a Rackham Merit Fellow. Her research interests include gender-based violence, public
health innovation and technology, health inequities, and stigma. To date, her work
has focused on Tribal health, community-based participatory research, HIV in global
contexts, wastewater monitoring, and using science and technology to support sustainable
development and peace.
Faith Okaalo, MPH, is a doctoral student in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education.
Her research interests lie at the intersection of sexual and reproductive health (SRH)
and HIV/AIDS, with a focus on adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) in Kenya. Her
research seeks to contribute to reducing HIV-related health disparities and promoting
equitable access to SRH services for AGYW in sub-Saharan Africa.
Clara Lucia Reyes, MPH, is a doctoral candidate and Rackham Merit Fellow at the University of Michigan
School of Public Health in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Equity. Clara
is also a Population Studies Center trainee at the Institute for Social Research.
She collaborates on projects using community-engaged approaches to understanding and
disrupting structural racism to advance health and social justice. She researches
how intersecting systems (e.g., social policy, criminal justice, immigration) shape
health and human rights among Latine and immigrant communities as well as the implications
of potential interventions implemented at local, state, and federal levels. Prior
to her doctoral studies, Clara collaborated with communities in the U.S.-Mexico border
region and in El Salvador on health equity initiatives related to cancer, maternal-child
health, and rural health and sanitation.
Melina Rodriguez (she/her/hers), MPH, is a doctoral student in the Department of Health Behavior and
Health Equity at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and a Rackham
Merit Fellow. Her research interests center on immigrant health, community resilience
and sustainability, and policy-driven health disparities. She draws on over eight
years of community organizing experience to bridge theory and practice, ensuring that
her research is responsive to community needs and grounded in lived experience. Her
previous work includes examining the health and safety of day laborers and domestic
workers responding to climate-related disasters in California, and exploring the impacts
of COVID-19 on Southeast Asian American communities in Los Angeles.
Amy Rusch MPH, is a doctoral student and Rackham Merit Fellow in the Department of Health Behavior
and Health Education at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Her research
interests revolve around mental health in school- and community-based settings. Utilizing
Implementation Science frameworks, theories, and strategies, she aims to focus her
work on improving the availability and accessibility of evidence-based mental health
resources and programming. She plans to deploy rigorous qualitative and quantitative
methods to identify effective ways to bridge gaps and improve mental health access
for underserved populations through an equity lens.
Sundas Saboor, MBBS, MPH, is a doctoral student in the Deparment of Health Behavior and Health
Education at the School of Public Health. Broadly, she is interested in women's health,
public health practices among Muslim women, artificial intelligence, and digital health.
Lily Shipp is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Equity. Prior
to beginning her PhD, Lily received her Master’s of Science in Public Health from
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and worked as a Senior Research Program
Coordinator in the Department of Epidemiology at BSPH where she coordinated studies
focused on HIV prevention and treatment programming for female sex workers in South
Africa. Currently, her research focuses on evaluating PrEP adherence outcomes among
women who use drugs and using implementation science methods to evaluate and improve
HIV prevention programs.
Maren Spolum, MPH, MPP (she/her/hers) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Health Behavior
and Health Education and a Population Studies Center demography trainee within the
Institute for Social Research. Broadly her research interests include the political
economy of health, structural racism, public policy, and health inequities. Maren
is specifically interested in tracing the historical and political conditions giving
rise to neoliberal policy decisions, and the role and impact those policies have had
in the social patterning of racial health inequities in the U.S.
Dominique SylversMPH is a PhD candidate in the department of Health Behavior & Health Equity. She is
also a trainee with the Population Studies Center and the Landscapes of Population
Health, both within the Institute for Social Research. Dominique’s research largely
centers around racial inequities in healthy aging, with a specific focus on the role
of structural and socio-historical influences. To-date, her work has examined inequities
in education and employment, neighborhood segregation, and place specific context
and their role on various aging outcomes, including cognition, dementia care giving,
and muscle strength.
Luz Venegas (she/her/hers), MPH, is a doctoral student in the Department of Health Behavior and
Health Equity at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and a Rackham
Merit Fellow. Ms. Venegas completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of
California, Berkeley in 2019 and her Master of Public Health degree in Epidemiology
at George Washington University in 2025. She is interested in multi-method, multi-level
interventions that analyze policy impacts on health and advocate for policy change.
Her research examines how power and the othering of key populations inform health
disparities, seeking to work with policy initiatives to address inequities in housing,
employment, and legal services.
Gabrielle Young MPH, CHES, is a doctoral student in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education
at the School of Public Health and a Rackham Merit Fellow. Broadly, she is interested
in policy and built environment interventions to address hunger and diet quality.
She has a special interest in the structural drivers of inequalities and their impact
on households meeting food needs.