News from the School of Public Health

It’s not just the first hint of fall foliage—the University of Maryland campus is glowing a definite red this week with crimson lights from Memorial Chapel to Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center.

Homecoming 2024 festivities kicked off Sunday night with SEE’s Homecoming Comedy Show, featuring Emmy award-winning comedian John Mulaney, and now, there’s tons of new ways to show off your Maryland pride leading up to the big game.

Among the fun and games at Boris' Block Party - the close to this year's School of Public Health Welcome Week - we caught up with some SPH undergraduates to hear why they chose to study public health and what they hope to do and be in the future! Many of our undergraduates are keenly aware of inequities within our public health systems and plan to use what they learn here at UMD to improve the lives of people in communities outside of their classrooms.

THE STATELY 23-STORY HOTEL OPENED AT the height of the Jazz Age, but less than a year later, Wall Street’s 1929 crash snuffed out revelry in the opulent ballroom and secret speakeasy. That’s when the property, then one of Baltimore’s tallest buildings, supposedly began accumulating ghosts: failed businessmen, wiped-out tycoons, even a bankrupt couple reputed to have jumped to their deaths on a downtown street with their young daughter.

Vonai Moyo '13 knew her dual passions from the start— as a child she dreamed of becoming a pediatrician and since the first grade she devoted herself to gymnastics.  At UMD’s School of Public Health (SPH) she nurtured these two loves and transformed them into two dynamic careers: working as a physician assistant (PA) and as a rookie member of the renowned New England Patriots

Before teen superstar Bryce Harper burst onto the scene, president mascots raced along the outfield fence and D.C. crowds danced to the tune of “Baby Shark,” the Major League Baseball team now known as the Washington Nationals was situated a little north of the border.

As a kid, Joanne Pérodin ('05 BS, ’09 MPH) loved to take things apart and put them back together again, like her bicycle or keyboard, and thought she might become an engineer. By the time she began her studies in kinesiology in 2001 at UMD’s School of Public Health, she had already lived through the tumult of political violence in her home city of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, along with the increasingly disastrous effects of extreme weather events on Haiti’s environment and population.