New UIC program inspires Chicago students to tackle public health challenges

7 hours ago 1

Published  July 14, 2025 6:02pm CDT

New UIC program inspires Chicago students to tackle public health challenges

CHICAGO - Mental health, infectious disease, climate change. Those are three major public health issues affecting us all — every day.

Some doctors say how we will do facing them in the future depends on the next generation of public health leaders.

In a FOX 32 special report, we take a look at a new program designed to help find them.

What we know:

It's summertime and 17-year-old Sai Auriga is still in the classroom — by choice.

"So at first, I really thought about my family and when I was going to apply for this because my dad, he struggled with diabetes. And as coming here to America as an immigrant myself, like, he didn't get the proper care in his own community. He didn't have access to the right resources," he said.

So when Sai heard about the new Public Health Innovators program starting up this summer at UIC, he wanted to apply.

Sai will be a senior at Walter Payton College Prep in the fall. He is one of the 20 Chicago Public High School junior and senior students selected to participate in the six-week program.

"We're calling it Chi PHI for short," said Emily Etzkorn.

Etzkorn manages the program, which is designed to inspire these students to become the next wave of public health leaders.

The definition of public health is the science of protecting and improving the health of people and their communities.

As the American population continues to age, she says it's critical that the pipeline to this field is reinforced.

"If we don't have a strong public health workforce, then we don't have, you know, healthy communities. We don't have healthy individuals," Etzkorn said.

Even though he's only a few weeks into the program, Sai says he's definitely learned that lesson.

"So I think one thing that stuck with me throughout, like, one of the things that the facilitator said, was that power is the ability to act," he said. "We can act ourselves to create change in our communities and, like, learn through public health. Like, what does that mean for us? What does that mean for the research in the future?"

If history is any indication of that, Sai remembers how Chicago's public health community came together during the pandemic five years ago.

"There's just something, like, that's powerful about that, that's like motivating, like public health is really about how. It centers on how community brings us together," he said.

"Public health to the community is everything. I mean, we experience public health every day, whether we realize it or not. Having clean drinking water is a public health thing. Wearing seatbelts is a public health thing," Etzkorn added.

That's why this program may not only lead to the next Dr. Allison Arwady, but a whole host of other public health leaders.

"So there's lots of things that you can do with public health, and we're aware of that. And so we are supportive of folks' pathways, whatever that might look like — whether it's directly to a degree program, whether it is directly to career. There's also lots of certificate and training opportunities," Etzkorn said.

Whether you want to be a doctor, a doula, or an environmental scientist, this program teaches students all the different aspects of public health.

One lesson is on food access.

"Food access is really important. There's lots of social determinants of health that sort of determine whether you are able to get access to fresh, healthy food or not — depending on the community that you live in," Etzkorn said.

And ways to improve access to food.

"We’re also going to have grow fabric, fabric grow kit bags in which our students will be able to plant little seedlings in these fabric grow kits, because sometimes it's hard to grow food in Chicago due to a number of reasons. Whether it's lead in the soil, whether it's cold half the year here," Etzkorn said.

Dig deeper:

Students also work with mentors from other local public health organizations to learn research and leadership skills.

The Public Health Innovators program was put together not only by UIC, but also Chicago's Department of Public Health and its One Summer Chicago youth employment program — which means those students also get paid for attending this class.

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