In Search of Social Justice: One Student’s Path to a Ph.D.
04/17/2018
Betelihem Tobo, M.P.H. ‘17, and current Ph.D. student, clearly remembers the moment she realized she wanted to commit to a doctoral degree.
While helping a professor with a research study on maternal and child health outcomes,
one of the participants unexpectedly decided to share her story with Tobo. The participant
talked about the environment of poverty and violence she had been born into; how it
affected her relationships and decisions throughout her life; and her motivation to
break the cycle for her newborn.
“I left that room and thought ‘I need to learn more’,” Tobo said. “I wanted to learn
about social determinants and understand what’s going on mechanistically; but it’s
hard to study the effect of income or education on a person’s health in the lab.”
“But public health has found ways to get around that; they’re helping us understand
what’s going on in these really complicated relationships between life exposures and
health outcomes that we’re just starting to understand are really significant. It’s
not just about a pathogen that enters your body...that’s not what health is confined
to.”
At the time, Tobo was completing a Master of Public Health degree, a field she was drawn to after discovering it could help her answer questions that
formed in her early childhood, growing up in Ethiopia and witnessing a lot of “brokenness
and poverty” on the streets. She came to the United States at the age of 8 thanks
to a diversity visa.
She chose Saint Louis University’s College for Public Health and Social Justice because of the social justice mission.
“I think about social justice in terms of what we shouldn’t be seeing. What we see
in this world is that your social identity does affect your mental health, your emotional
health...your physical health. And... whether or not you belong; whether or not society
says that you have value, dignity, worth and you’re able to contribute to the best
of your ability,” she says, adding:
“We’ve unintentionally written these narratives so that being black, for example, is automatically associated with negative health outcomes when, in fact, it’s not bad -- it’s the lived experiences and how society responds to those social identities that is leading to those negative outcomes.”
For her dissertation, Tobo has chosen to deepen her knowledge of factors influencing maternal and child health outcomes, exploring the relationship risk of unplanned pregnancy and dental and mental health. As a researcher, Tobo aims to illustrate the bigger picture behind social factors and health.
About the College for Public Health and Social Justice
The Saint Louis University College for Public Health and Social Justice is the only academic unit of its kind, studying social, environmental and physical influences that together determine the health and well-being of people and communities.
It also is the only accredited school or college of public health among nearly 250 Catholic institutions of higher education in the United States. Guided by a mission of social justice and focus on finding innovative and collaborative solutions for complex health problems, the College offers nationally recognized programs in public health, social work, health administration, applied behavior analysis, criminology and criminal justice and urban planning and development.