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Depending on where Marylanders live, their assurance of safe drinking water isn’t always crystal clear. In some Baltimore neighborhoods, it can be brown. While the city’s drinking water meets federal safety standards when it leaves municipal treatment plants, it might pick up lead, E. coli and other contaminants while flowing through a network of aging pipes before reaching a drinking glass. 

It can be as simple as a high-five from a kid while prepping an anti-bullying workshop in Prince George’s County. Or seeing a family equipped with tools like mosquito nets to reduce their malaria risk in Sierra Leone.

“It’s so rewarding to volunteer in these communities,” said biological sciences major Meghna Pandey ’24, co-president of the University of Maryland’s Public Health Beyond Borders—the first organization of its kind at an American college.

Students from across the University of Maryland gathered at the School of Public Health to showcase their research during the annual SPH Public Health Research & Practice Day on Wednesday, April 4, one of several events taking place in SPH as part of National Public Health Week.

LGBTQ+ as well as Black and Latinx populations are at increased risk for using tobacco products, so youths of color who are LGBTQ+ are squarely in the sights of Big Tobacco. As a result, they experience greater tobacco-related health burdens than their non-LGBTQ+ and white peers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Students and instructors from across the world will soon be connected with those in the University of Maryland School of Public Health community, thanks to grants awarded to several SPH departments and faculty to establish new global public health classrooms.

Terps like to say that they are “fearless”, always pushing “fearlessly forward”. For SPH Dean’s Council member Deborah Gebhardt, Ph.D. ’79, “fearless” means jumping into the action, not always knowing what lies ahead. This trailblazer has spent a lifetime breaking barriers and forging a path of excellence, from early days playing baseball alongside the boys in her Hazleton, Pennsylvania, neighborhood, to founding a company that regularly counsels leaders of the nation’s largest organizations.