The American Samoa Community College (ASCC) and Yale School of Public Health (YSPH) have signed a memorandum of understanding creating an official partnership.
As part of the agreement, YSPH will provide internship opportunities for ASCC students, collaborate on the development of a new institutional review board (IRB) at the college, and help with efforts to archive research.
YSPH has had an active presence in American Samoa for almost 10 years. Nicola Hawley, associate professor of epidemiology (chronic diseases), and Becca Levy, professor of public health (social and behavioral sciences) and psychology, have each secured funding from the National Institutes of Health to conduct research in the region.
Hawley is currently conducting research and overseeing several community programs aimed at reducing obesity and improving health in American Samoa. She has worked in, both, the independent nation of Samoa and American Samoa for over a decade, starting her work in Samoa in 2009.
“American Samoa is an incredibly underserved medical professional shortage area with an absurd burden of chronic disease… in that scenario, public health carries a different weight,” Hawley said. “It is really important that public health is able to support that lacking clinical infrastructure.”
During her time in American Samoa, Hawley has served as a mentor for ASCC’s STEP-UP program, an NIH-funded initiative that stands for Short-term Research Experience for Underrepresented Persons; that program was how she met Mata’u Faiai, who is now a PhD student in Chronic Disease Epidemiology at YSPH. She is also currently leading a diabetes intervention project.
Levy, who has a doctorate in social psychology and focuses on psychosocial epidemiology, is investigating how different public health concerns impact people across their lifespans in an attempt to find innovative ways to improve long-term community health.
During the YSPH team’s visit with a class of ASCC students interested in the health sciences, two graduates of the college, who are now involved in public health research, spoke to the class.
One of the graduates, Joshua Naseri, grew up in both American Samoa and the Independent State of Samoa. He graduated in 2016 from ASCC, where he completed his Associate of Science degree majoring in health sciences.
“He was the person that students wanted to see in that room…” Hawley said. “For the students in this most recent talk that we did, they got to see what a career in public health looks like, through him.”
Naseri received a platinum scholarship to attend North Park University Chicago where he completed his Bachelor of Health Science degree in 2019. After returning home to American Samoa and serving in the American Samoa Department of Health for nearly three years, he now is a program manager for the OLAGA Research Center established by Hawley.
