Student Wins Fulbright Scholarship to Study Global Health in Taiwan.
Grace Yoon (SPH’20), a recent School of Public Health graduate, has been awarded a 2020 Fulbright US Student Program Scholarship. The prestigious study/research award will enable Yoon to pursue her research interests in global health, health systems, and health equity at National Taiwan University (NTU), where she will begin a PhD program in global health in the fall.
Yoon, who earned a Master of Science in health services and systems research at SPH this past May, has held an interest in global health for several years, conducting comparative global health policy research at Hong Kong Polytechnic University in fall 2015 during her undergraduate studies at Northeastern University. She says the coronavirus pandemic has provided an opportunity for her to expand her research as she enters the next chapter of her academic education.
“I really enjoyed the high-level thinking that’s required for country-to-country, national-level comparisons,” says Yoon of her policy work in Hong Kong. “I think COVID-19 presents new relevant focal points that I haven’t written about before.”
The Fulbright US Student Program provides grants for graduate degrees, individually designed study/research projects or for English Teaching Assistant Programs during one academic year in a participating country outside the US. Scholarship recipients gain cultural and intellectual exposure in the classroom and through community engagement. Yoon will be based at the university’s main campus in Taipei City, Taiwan.
The Fulbright scholarship creates an exchange of knowledge between two places that can benefit multiple countries, says Yoon.
She says she plans to study the impact and handling of COVID-19 “on a global scale and on a broader level.
“I hope to examine how different countries responded and how the outcomes were different on a population level,” she says.
While at SPH, Yoon started a policy internship at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH) and supported research for Boston University and Boston Medical Center on maternal depression, telehealth, and safe injection sites. Before joining SPH, Yoon worked as a qualitative investigator at Tufts Medical Center to research patient and caregiver perspectives, cancer screening feasibility, and social determinants of health for pediatric care.
After studying in Boston and Hong Kong, Yoon sees an intersection between local and global public health. “Hong Kong was my first exposure to policy research, and where I learned how to do extensive document reviews,” Yoon says. “I see that work mostly being applied to DPH because it is very much policy-related. There’s a team that I’m secondarily involved in doing policy data collection around substance abuse treatment and policy changes around the COVID-19 emergency. I think that kind of policy review has benefited me a lot.”
Yoon says the knowledge she gained in health services research and health economics at SPH paved the way for her scholarship at NTU, and she credits her professors for encouraging her to apply her knowledge inside and outside of the classroom.
“I learned a lot of what I know at BU,” Yoon says. “Above all, I got to know so many different faculty members who just showed me a lot of different ways to think about things. It was a really beneficial and critical point to prepare me for my doctoral work.”