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

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. 

On Thursday, student organizations, academic programs and other School of Public Health involvement groups gathered for the school’s annual SPH Involvement Fair, held in the School on its ground floor Concourse.

Twenty-two-year-old A hated that they’d had to start wearing a bra earlier than classmates and desperately wanted to be flat-chested. As a teen, while watching a show on weight loss, they saw a man wrap himself in plastic wrap to sweat off a few pounds—and thought, “What if I shrink-wrapped my chest?” The flaw in this plan quickly became apparent: They couldn’t breathe.