Ciyana Smith is a Master of Science in Public Health student in the Department of Health, Behavior, and Society at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She hold’s a Bachelor of Science in Biology from UMass Boston. In addition to working as a graduate assistant with Hopkins USTAR she is a research assistant for the Collaborative for Research on Women’s Nutrition Project. After graduating, Ciyana began her career at UMass as a research assistant on two maternal and child health projects. Her prior work focused on birth equity and providing evidence-based information on child development post-exposure to medications and vaccines during pregnancy and breastfeeding. As a Dorchester, Massachusetts native, Ciyana hopes to improve maternal health and birth outcomes through her training as a pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum care Doula and public health researcher. Her research interests are health literacy, sexual health education, and maternal health disparities.
Jaden Huynh is a Master of Science in Public Health student at Johns Hopkins, holding a B.S. in Cognitive Science with minors in Business & Global Health from UC San Diego. His research began with uncovering higher mortality rates in cancer patients with serious mental illness and continued through an NIH fellowship studying ADHD and brain cancer. Jaden's diverse projects include investigating infant language acquisition and identifying neurophysiological biomarkers of OCD. Passionate about health policy, he has interned at Desire Health Magazine, writing on cancer treatment inequalities and hospice care, and served as a grant writer at Our Time to Act United, supporting LGBTQ+ youth. Currently, Jaden is a research assistant at Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, intern at the Maryland Department of Health's Cancer & Chronic Disease Bureau, graduate assistant at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, focusing on healthcare experiences among Black Queer Young Adults, and mentors trainees in the Hopkins USTAR program.
