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. At Brown's School of Public Health, it means a new group of students are about to graduate from public health student to public health professional.
To celebrate, we talked to two students graduating from the Masters in Public Health program: Campbell Loi and Graham Huntington. They have a few things in common. They both went to Brown as undergraduates and then stuck around for the Five-Year combined Undergraduate/MPH program. Over the years, they’ve gotten to be pretty good friends, too.
As they prepare to graduate later this month, we asked Campbell and Graham about their time at Brown, and how it feels to enter the field of public health in 2026.
LISTEN TO THE COMPLETE INTERVIEW HERE
Can you tell us when the two of you met and when your journey together as public health people started?
Campbell Loi: I remember meeting Graham in stats class junior year, and then we both had a humanitarian response seminar right after, so we would walk together.
Graham Huntington: Sprint together!
Loi: It was pretty far away.
Tell us about the humanitarian response class, especially the assignment on simulations, which stresses practical problem solving for humanitarian crises.
Loi: Those simulations were hard.
Huntington: Yeah, they were no joke.
Loi: There was one simulation I can remember where Dr. Levine had us come in, he said, “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 tents to people, and you had to 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 going to cost, in 45 minutes.
When did you get the bug for public health? Why did you decide to study this field in the first place?
Huntington: When I first came to Brown, I thought I would study political science or international public affairs. I was very much on the politics track. But before I got to Brown, I started working as an EMS, on an ambulance, and then I got confused. I thought, “Well, I really like the health care field. But I’m more of a humanities guy.” It wasn’t until I actually met with Dr. Levine and spoke with him that I really was introduced to the field of public health.
Graham, we understand you aren’t the only member of your family working in Emergency Medical Services.
Huntington: I’m from Vermont, and my grandparents worked in EMS. I started about six years ago, and soon after, my mom and brother also joined. Back home, my mom and I work together in first-response. Because Vermont is very rural, ambulances can take a while to arrive. So when a call comes in, I hear it on my pager and radio, get in my car, turn on the lights, and say, “Mom, get in the car.” Then we head to the scene and start care before the ambulance arrives about 10 minutes later. I also work on the ambulance in both Vermont and Rhode Island.
Campbell, health care is central to your family as well.
Loi: 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. There was also 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 [to Public Health] after that, and I just kept really enjoying everything. I just kept going, and now here I am.
What has it been like to study public health in a time when it is kind of under attack?
Loi: Oh, it’s weird.
Huntington: We would come into our biostats class, and our professor would say, “Okay, these are the datasets that are no longer available, and this is how we have to rewrite our grants.” He downloaded as many datasets as he could and just about everyone at the school was doing the same.
Loi: I remember that day, 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 remember it so vividly.
What keeps you motivated in the face of a pretty tough few years for public health?
Loi: I went to a conference for the Consortium for Global Health, CUGH, a couple weeks ago. Hearing from so many people doing amazing work in the field despite everything that’s going on was really inspiring, especially 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. Just at Brown’s School of Public Health, everyone’s doing such cool and important work. My professors have been so helpful and engaging, inspiring.
What about you, Graham?
Huntington: A lot of people at the School of Public Health and across public health institutions and agencies, are seeing their research funding get cut, but they’re still showing up every day, right? We had professors every day who would come to class, having just lost a big grant or had taken a hit to one of their initiatives, but are still there to teach us and are still working just as hard.
It’s certainly not good what’s happening. I talk to people and they talk about how to rebuild. You don’t want to rebuild the same structures that have failed so easily or that have, in some cases, perpetrated harm. Instead, they’re talking about how to make it more equitable, more localized, more impactful, and I think that's really cool.
Campbell, you’re entering the public health job market, looking for opportunities in global health development. Graham, you’re off to nurse practitioner school at Mass General Hospital. What are some of the most valuable skills you learned in the five-year program that you think you’ll carry into the next chapter of your life?
Huntington: There are some very practical, technical skills, such as biostatistics and epidemiology and being able to do some coding in R or Stata. I also think there’s a language in public health and learning how to speak that language and understand it is incredibly important. What Brown does well is teaching how to communicate these things to a lay audience or patients or whoever you’re working with in the community. It’s super important for me.
Loi: I guess the most tangible thing I can think of are my biostats skills, like the ability to code in Stata, and my qualitative analysis skills. My thesis actually was very qualitatively focused, so, learning how to develop an interview guide, conduct interviews, code them inductively in NVivo, and then abstract those results and find conclusions. And I also had a great experience doing that with focus groups here, too.
What are you most excited about moving on to your new chapter, and what are you going to miss the most from Brown?
Huntington: 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 full-time, and that's pretty exciting. I’m trying not to quote the “learn public health by doing public health” motto that the School of Public Health pushes so much, but it’s true.
Loi: Yeah. I’m realizing as I’m nearing the end that I’ve been going to school for five years straight, and it has definitely taken a toll. But I will miss the ability to absorb new information every day. I know I’ll still learn with a job, but being a student is so different. And the freedom that we have to learn literally whatever we want at Brown has been really awesome as well, and I think that that’s unique to this school.
Huntington: This might be a little cliché, but I'll miss the people the most. There are a lot of really great friends, mentors and peers at Brown. It’s a very interdisciplinary school that has allowed me to explore a lot of different niches of different parts of public health, for which I am very grateful.