Five years after its conception and three years after its launch, Colgate University’s Global Public and Environmental Health (GPEH) program continues to grow.
The minor is an interdisciplinary approach to understanding health issues through the natural sciences and humanities. After students take the required introductory course, GPEH 100: Introduction to Global and Environmental Health, they pursue courses across disciplines from five perspectives: methodological, scientific, social, environmental, and humanities.
“GPEH is quintessentially liberal arts because it’s interdisciplinary,” says Professor Rebecca Upton, who is the program director. “It adds to our ability to do the liberal arts, to be liberal arts thinkers and practitioners because it’s pulling from all of these different places.”
Upton and Professor Bineyam Taye were instrumental in creating the program, and Taye was the inaugural director until this academic year.
“Like trends across the country, it was clear that ours was an undergraduate institution with a great deal of interest from students and faculty in establishing a global public and environmental health program,” Upton says. Faculty members had been working on related scholarship and were teaching related courses. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, it “just made it that much clearer that this was, and is, the way forward if we are going to be able to prevent disease and improve health outcomes across cultural contexts,” she adds.
Interest in the program has grown since its inception, and there are currently approximately 100 students minoring in GPEH.
“The curriculum pushed me outside of my comfort zone and helped me see new ways of conceptualizing the field of public health,” says Sophia Lager ’26. “I’ve taken classes in several departments, all taught through different focuses and theories, including gender studies, anthropology, and psychology. This interdisciplinary focus has deepened my understanding of how health is impacted by a wide variety of social, cultural, and political factors.”
GPEH has also provided students with opportunities to do independent studies, ranging from tobacco-cessation programs in Madison County to awareness campaigns about tick-borne disease.
GPEH minor Sloan Petersohn ’26, along with Emilia Spina ’26, runs the club Public Health Initiatives, which promotes awareness of public health issues on campus and in the greater Colgate community. They work each year with the National Marrow Donor Program to encourage students to register as blood stem cell donors. They have also been raising awareness of ticks and tick-borne diseases by increasing accessibility to preventative resources.
Going forward, Taye is interested in having the department offer additional research and travel opportunities, building on past success. For instance, Catherine Bennett ’24 published a paper on antimicrobial resistance in the journal Antimicrobial Stewardship and Healthcare Epidemiology and is currently pursuing a master’s in health and international development at the London School of Economics. “This is a good indicator of the research output of the GPEH,” Taye notes.
For students who are interested in health-related careers but don’t see themselves in medical school, the program supports alternate paths, such as graduate programs like Bennett’s.
Lager herself aspires to follow this path after she graduates from Colgate. “Connecting with professors with incredible backgrounds and peers with similar long-term goals has been so helpful and meaningful,” she says.