Emily Hansen - Environmental Health Sciences

As a student in the Environmental Health program, Emily Hansen took an Air Pollution course that she remembers as "challenging." Lately, it's been coming in handy.

In August 2003, Hansen, who received her MPH in October 2002, began an Association of Schools of Public Health fellowship at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. As part of the CDC's Environmental Public Health Tracking Branch, she's researching air pollution and asthma, looking at ways to connect data between environmental hazards and chronic health problems in order to build a framework for future research hypotheses.

Hansen says her experiences in the Division of Environmental and Occupational Health offered her enormous opportunities.

She's grateful for the school's mentor program and required field experience, both of which connected her with officials at the Minnesota Department of Health. Hansen worked there from March 2002 to June 2003, developing a program in birth defect surveillance. That experience - and her master's thesis on environmental and public health surveillance - helped her land her fellowship.

"When I went into the program I wasn't sure what I wanted to focus on," says Hansen, 27. "It allowed me to be flexible and try out a bunch of different areas. It put me in a place where I can work effectively with different professionals."