By: Christina Torrealba (she/her), Graduate Student in Community Health and Epidemiology

Over the past few weeks I’ve had the chance to chat with some really great people from our office. In this blogpost, I’ll be introducing you to a few new faces at the Office of Community Partnerships and Global Health!

Herve Kazungu: Program Assistant, PLANS

Herve Kazungu is the PLANS Program Assistant and a third year student studying biochemistry and neuroscience, with an honours in neuroscience.

How did you get involved in PLANS?

In my second year, PLANS hosted a lot of events and I started to get to know about PLANS and what it does and how it helps people like me who are really passionate about medicine and want to become physicians, or pretty much any other career in health. How PLANS supports you, connects you to mentors and everything. So I started attending their events and it was really fun meeting a lot of people who are really important and people who have made it to where I wanna be.

What are you most excited for in this role?

One of the things I’m really excited about is seeing all the kids who participated in the camps, where they’re going to be in the next 10 years. It’s pretty amazing because you know where they started and all the stuff they talked about, what they wanted to become. Basically, how PLANS will be in the next 10 years, because those high school kids will now be the mentors to the next generation.

What’s one fun fact you’d like to share with the blog about yourself?

I’m passionate about sports and nutrition, and I love to cook.

 

Elise Sammons: Manager, Global and Planetary Health

Elise Sammons is the Manager of Global and Planetary Health and a doctoral student studying political science and international relations.

What led to you starting this role?

My education is in political science and international relations has been a major focus of mine, and global health is such a diverse field that includes people from a number of different disciplines, including social science perspectives and humanities perspectives. That’s something that I really find fascinating about the field, and that’s the same thing for planetary health. It’s a pretty new field, but there are so many diverse perspectives that are coming together to try to solve some of these really big problems and try to think about how we can actually improve health outcomes for people, and how some of these big issues like climate change are actually intertwined with health issues as well as a lot of different social justice issues. That’s what I find so interesting about global health and planetary health – trying to tackle some really big, complicated problems by bringing together a lot of different people and a lot of different perspectives and a lot of different expertise.

What are you most excited for in this role?

What I’m most excited about in the role is the idea of building relationships across the university and connecting different people who are working on research and education programming related to these topics. There are so many perspectives that are involved in this field and so to do some of that work at Dalhousie. to help bring some of those people together, to help build some of those bridges, that’s really exciting to me.

What’s one fun fact you’d like to share with the blog about yourself?

One of my favourite things to do is hiking, and one of the things that I love most about Nova Scotia is the beautiful hiking trails, especially the ones with ocean views.