What Does Public Health Really Mean? These High Schoolers Found Out.

Fifty-nine high school students walked into the Yale School of Public Health on April 11 with only a general idea of what public health means. Some assumed it had something to do with diseases, maybe pandemics. By the end of the day, their understanding had grown to include topics such as gun violence, data use in urban planning, artificial intelligence, lead paint, and even the music playing in their earbuds.

That was exactly the point.

Public Health Day 2026, organized by YSPH's Office of Community & Practice with Yale Pathways, a program of Yale University’s Office of New Haven Affairs, brought together students from across the region for a full day of hands-on workshops designed to expose them to the expansiveness of community-focused public health.

Public Health Day highlighted Yale School of Public Health’s commitment to reaching the next generation of potential public health leaders before they have chosen a path and showing them what the field looks like up close.

After just one workshop, Bryan Arriaga-Ventura of West Haven High School put it simply: "A career in public health means understanding how to support people," he said.

Rather than traditional lectures, the workshops offered hands-on experiences.

In one room, students picked up XRF analyzers — the same handheld devices used by certified inspectors to test homes for lead contamination — and learned to read the data themselves. Glenda Buenaventura, MPH, director of New Haven's Environmental Health Department, explained why lead poisoning is a persistent and preventable problem in older cities like New Haven, how exposure can happen quietly inside homes, and how science helps protect families before harm occurs.

For Jason Guo of Cheshire High School, the presentation reframed his thinking. "Public health isn't just about the wellbeing of the environment," he said after the session, "but the wellbeing of communities."

In another room, students joined a 60-minute hackathon led by Dr. Terika McCall's Consumer Health Informatics Lab. In small teams, they identified a real public health challenge in their community, such as mental health, homelessness, or water quality, and built a simple digital prototype to address it.

Meanwhile, Dr. Ijeoma Opara's SASH Lab took a more unexpected angle: music. Students dug into the mental health messages buried inside song lyrics, learned to code and analyze lyrical data for patterns, and debated how those messages shape teenagers' mental health — and what social scientists can do about it.

One of the most emotionally charged sessions of the day was the firearm injury prevention workshop, led by YSPH Community Scholar Nelba Marquez-Greene, LMFT; pediatrician James Dodington, MD; YSPH Research Program Manager Jennifer Leano; and MPH student Maia Gouazé.

Early in the session, Leano asked if anyone in the room had been personally affected by gun violence. One hand went up. Later, students grouped together for an icebreaker — moving left or right based on how strongly they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements. When the statement read, "Gun violence is a problem in my community," nine out of 11 students moved to the "Strongly Agree" side of the room.

"In September, my friend was shot and killed," one student shared.

The workshop introduced students to photovoice — a research methodology that uses photography to capture lived experience — and challenged them to think about public communication around firearm injury prevention. By the end, students broke into teams to design social media campaigns. One group rushed to the whiteboard to sketch their concept. Another had their phones out and was filming a TikTok within seconds. A third group emerged with a rallying cry they had coined themselves: "Stop the silence. End gun violence."

In a session led by DataHaven's Youth Advisory Council, students became community decision-makers. Armed with real data on food access, transportation, environmental conditions, and youth health across New Haven neighborhoods like the Hill, East Rock, and Fair Haven, they had to decide how to spend limited resources — and then adapt when unexpected events threw their strategies off course.

"To me, public health is bringing equity to neighborhoods — sociologically, geographically," said Saanika Tipnis, a Youth Advisory Council member and incoming biometry and statistics student at Cornell. "It's how policy is used to ensure people aren't disadvantaged because of where they live."

For Siri Sameet and Jackson Gelfand, both first-year students at Amity High School, the simulation introduced something new. Their strategy for the Hill neighborhood included adding speed bumps to reduce pedestrian injuries and stocking pharmacies with Narcan.

"Before, I wasn't aware that public health meant stopping car crashes," Sameet said.

"I thought public health was all biological — diseases — and less urban planning," Gelfand added.

By the end of the day, the question posed in the morning—what does public health mean?—was answered not with a single definition, but with many. Lead paint and TikToks. Music lyrics and overdose kits. Data simulations and a student's quiet hand raised in a room full of strangers.

"Before, I only thought public health meant pandemics," said Giancarlos Hernandez, a 14-year-old first-year studentat Notre Dame High School. "Now I know public health is everything — food, gun violence, everything."