This spring, Health & Medicine welcomes our fifth cohort of interns in our Equity Intern Program. Courtney L. Savage Hoggard continues her work from Fall 2021, while Sabrina Uddin and Stephanie Robinson, our Spring 2022 Ben Squires Equity Intern, join the team.

In 2019, Courtney L. Savage Hoggard received a Bachelor of Arts in Health and Human Biology and Latin American and Caribbean Studies from Brown University. She has worked as an Associate at the Milken Institute in Washington, D.C., interned at the Commonwealth Fund in New York City, and is currently enrolled in the Master of Bioethics (MBE) program at the University of Pennsylvania. where she intends to focus her scholarly project on how systemic racism informs patient autonomy and clinical ethics. She plans to continue studying the role the history of medicine and science play in the upholding of white supremacy within healthcare systems while in medical school.

Stephanie Robinson, 2022 Spring Ben Squires Equity Intern, holds a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan. Most recently, she worked as a Research Evaluator for the Prenatal Stress Study at Michigan Medicine, helping to research the effects of prenatal and postnatal stress on early childhood development. She is currently pursuing a Master of Healthcare Administration at the University of Illinois Chicago. She is passionate about health equity and population health. In her spare time, she enjoys traveling, reading, and spending time with friends and family.

Sabrina Uddin is a Master of Public Health student at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the division of Health Policy and Administration. She graduated from Drake University in 2021 with a B.S. in Health Sciences. She discovered a passion for public health through an Americorps position with a Community Action Partnership in Des Moines, Iowa, focused on expanding both housing and food security. She also interned with the Polk County Health Department’s Healthy Women program, working to provide health services for underserved women in the community. In her free time, she enjoys reading, baking, and indoor gardening.

In 2018, Health & Medicine created an Internship Equity Committee charged with developing a new model for internships, called the Equity Intern Program, in which unpaid intern labor is replaced with a paid internship model, and for which we established a “one door” application process so that opportunities are not limited to the well-connected. Providing paid internships is an important step toward creating and sustaining a diverse, equitable, accessible, and inclusive workforce.

A successful internship can be an integral part of a person’s education and professional development. Our internship program supports the next generation of professionals who share the belief in our mission of health equity and social justice. Our interns are largely graduate students in the Chicagoland area interested in gaining experience in public health. Health & Medicine supports three cohorts of three interns per year, for a total of nine interns.