Student Profiles

Leading with purpose: CUNY SPH 2024 valedictorian Adrian Blader champions transgender health equity

Adrian Blader, the 2024 valedictorian of CUNY SPH, delivered a poignant address reflecting on the challenges faced by the graduating class, from the effects of COVID-19, to the strain of protests and war, all while navigating remote learning. Blader, the first trans person to present the valedictorian address, emphasized the importance of hope and resilience in the face of adversity.

“During these chaotic times, we were learning about inequity and injustice in the classroom and seeing it in the real world, through the pandemic, through our jobs, through political attacks on health care access for transgender people and reproductive health care,” said Blader in their valedictory address. “Seeing all this, it might have been tempting for us to fall into despair, but we didn’t. One of my favorite classes in graduate school was Professor Freudenberg’s class on activism in New York City. On our first day, he asked what we wanted to take away from the course, and I said, hope, and hope is exactly what I have gotten from this degree and from working alongside you all. I have found hope through learning from previous public health movements and the people who came before us.”

Blader began their public health journey as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, where they completed a major in international studies and a minor in global health and gender studies.

“I was really global health focused as an undergrad,” says Blader, and indeed, they joined the Peace Corps after graduation. They spent the next two years in Moldova, a tiny country bordering Ukraine, where they developed and taught health education curricula, wrote grants to support local students, and developed culturally appropriate trainings for staff at a clinic on how to better serve LGBTQ+ youth in healthcare settings.

“But a lot of international development work can be so tricky,” says Blader. “How do I do this in a non-imperialistic way? Who am I to come and either teach or impart my cultural norms? Those were really hard questions to answer for myself while I was in the Peace Corps. I loved that experience, it was so important to me, but I was having a hard time wrestling with those emotions.”

On returning to the U.S., Blader decided to pivot to more local initiatives. They came to New York City to work at Montefiore in the Bronx as a community health organizer in 2020, just as COVID-19 was beginning its campaign of devastation in the city. “It was difficult timing,” recalls Blader.

Undaunted, in January 2021 they embarked on an MPH in community health at CUNY SPH, beginning their studies fully remotely during the extended COVID lockdown. “I loved getting this degree. I really did. It was definitely a lot of work, but it was all work that was interesting and engaging. And so many of the professors have such a social justice focus in a way that I really appreciated and was very different from much of my experience as an undergrad.

Blader found they had a lot of freedom to pursue their particular focus on LGBTQ+ health, specifically the health of transgender and gender nonconforming (TGNC) people, even though it wasn’t an official specialization offered by the school. “I got a lot of support from professors when I chose those topics.”

They were thrilled to connect with other students who shared that particular interest. “There was diversity of both opinion and background, but I had a lot of classmates who were really values aligned with me, and I didn’t feel like a radical.”

Balancing full-time work while going to school, as many of their classmates did, was challenging. However, working at a hospital while studying public health proved immensely beneficial. “I feel like public health and healthcare don’t always talk to each other. Being boots on the ground, I can see what works and what isn’t going to work. Being able to bring those real-life experiences into the classroom, and the lessons of the classroom into my job, really enriched my educational experience.”

Blader is fully committed to bringing the lived experiences of stakeholders into their public health research and advocacy. “I learned a lot about community based participatory research in Professor Sasha Fleary’s class, Applied Mixed Methods in Community Health Research. Having community buy in, and community input—not just asking them for their opinions, but involving them in the whole process, from start to finish—is absolutely critical. After my concerns about cultural imperialism in the Peace Corp, this class was a big, full circle moment for me.”

Currently Blader is a program manager for the community health worker (CHW) program at NYC Health + Hospitals. They manage three departments at the South Brooklyn Health facility, overseeing CHWs in adult primary care, pediatrics, and asthma/COPD. Their team works with patients to identify and address barriers to health and wellbeing, such as housing, financial, food and legal needs, as well as helping them navigate the healthcare system.

“I love that this role, much like the MPH program at CUNY SPH, sees health holistically—not just focusing on the medical aspects, but also on the social determinants of health—and focuses on building sustainable relationships within the community that promote health,” they say.

Blader is also the lead of the LGBTQ+ Inclusion Group at South Brooklyn Health, where they work on initiatives to help make the system more inclusive of LGBTQ+ patients, employees and community members. “I would love to do more work that focuses on LGBTQ+ health equity,” they say. “My specific area of interest is chronic disease prevention and outcomes for LGBTQ+ folks, specifically trans people.”

Finding a public health niche and seeing it through

As an undergrad at Hunter College, Alexa D’Angelo took a public health class that just felt right. “I was like, okay, this tracks,” she says. “These broad population health questions are what I’m interested in.”

She then took a class in human sexuality, where the professor devoted a lecture to the HIV prevention medication PrEP, which was very new at the time.

“He laid out all the information,” she recounts. “ ‘Here are the HIV incidence rates. This is how effective PrEP is. But it’s not being used at the rate that we need it to be,’ And I just couldn’t wrap my head around that. Why isn’t this medication reaching the folks who can benefit from it most?”

Her interest sparked, D’Angelo stayed with that question. In 2017, she embarked on her MPH at CUNY SPH and began working as a research assistant at the CUNY Institute for Implementation Science in Population Health (ISPH) with Professor Christian Grov. This was at the beginning of Grov’s landmark Together 5000 project, a large cohort study following primarily gay and bisexual men who are vulnerable to HIV across the U.S. to understand factors related to HIV infection as well as PrEP uptake.

Much of her initial work on the project was interacting with study participants, helping them move through a fairly complicated study protocol, in which they were completing annual online surveys and using HIV test kits mailed to them by Together 5000. She eventually became a project coordinator and had opportunities to lead several qualitative sub-studies within the cohort.

Through in-depth interviews with many of the Together 5000 study subjects, it became clear to her that insurance payment barriers, including high out-of-pocket expenses, prior-authorization requirements, and claims denials were substantial impediments to PrEP use. A close read of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) led her to conclude that some of these insurance practices are illegal, and some are attributable to loopholes in the ACA that allow some commercial insurers to forgo coverage for preventive services.

“All told, there are things going on at the regulatory and policy levels that leave folks without a guarantee to universal PrEP access—which is ultimately the goal when you’re aiming to end an epidemic,” she says. “I think cataloguing these issues, measuring them and calling them out in peer reviewed literature is helpful.”

She hopes her work will be useful to advocacy efforts aimed at improving PrEP access in the U.S.

Today, D’Angelo is nearing the end of her doctoral studies. She has been an author on 29 peer-reviewed publications—10 as first author—an extraordinary achievement for a student. She is now project manager of Grov’s AMETHST 5000, a continuation the work of Together 5000, but with a greater focus on methamphetamine for its role in HIV vulnerability and seroconversion.

D’Angelo’s doctoral dissertation focuses on health insurance as a factor in LGBTQ health disparities more broadly, both as a factor that might exacerbate disparities and complicate access to care, and then as a central, needed source of payment for care. With the help of Associate Professor Emma Tsui, D’Angelo developed expertise in qualitative methodologies, which she uses to learn about how individuals navigate insurance challenges within the domains of PrEP access, accessing gender-affirming care and mental health care.

“I want to follow folks’ experiences navigating our healthcare and insurance systems to access care and leverage qualitative methods and data to uncover the issues at the policy level that can be addressed,” she says.

Reflecting on her experience at CUNY SPH, D’Angelo says, “I’m probably in the last year of my PhD program, and it’s going to be sad for me, because I’ve really enjoyed my time as a student at the school, and I’ve been very fortunate to work with so many inspiring professors, as well as my incredible peers in the program.”

“I kind of hit the jackpot in terms of finding an advisor who is also a great mentor, but even more important, a great fit,” she continues. “That’s the dynamic you want in a PhD program, because it propels you through it. I’m also very grateful to professors Emma Tsui, Naomi Zewde, and Nick Freudenberg, who have been generous in contributing both their deep knowledge and their personal experience to my education.”

About working at CUNY ISPH, she says, “A real strength of the institute is its ability to shift and respond to what’s going on in the world. There’s a lot of opportunity and flexibility to meet important research needs as they come up.”

Asked about her post-graduation career plans, D’Angelo replies, “I want to do the work I’ve been doing, which might sound anticlimactic, but I really enjoy this research, and for me, the pairing of qualitative methods with policy analysis has become a methodological niche I particularly enjoy and want to keep exploring. Wherever I end up, I just want to continue this work.”

Life’s challenges shape a doctoral student’s relentless drive

Thinh Vu came to CUNY SPH as a doctoral candidate with a burning drive to achieve. Since his arrival in 2021, he has garnered numerous honors and awards and co-authored 12 peer-reviewed publications (including nine as first or co-first author), with at least 10 more papers in progress.

His body of research spans HIV, substance use, and mental health—problems that can overlap in the lives of people in underserved communities. Growing up in Vietnam, Vu witnessed these issues up-close.

“My family was poor,” he recalls. “We were unhoused for about two years, sleeping at a pesticide storage area—there were no homeless shelters. I grew up around sex workers and people who inject drugs, many of whom were living with HIV and faced mental health challenges. These are the people I want to help.”

In high school, his best friend committed suicide. “That’s another reason I want to focus on mental health, especially in Vietnam,” he says.

The notion of mental health in his home country is in its infancy, and mental health challenges are profoundly stigmatized.

In choosing to pursue public health, Vu aimed to break down cycles of disadvantage among underserved and BIPOC communities and dispel the ignorance and stigma that hinder mental health care back in Vietnam and here in New York City.

That mission has fueled the steep trajectory of Vu’s scholarly career. He was the first in his family to graduate high school. He went on to earn a bachelor of public health from Hanoi Medical University, where he was valedictorian of his major. He then set about applying for international scholarships in public health master’s programs, successfully garnering a total of five such offers. He ultimately accepted a full scholarship from the NIH/Fogarty program that allowed him to attend the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and earn an MS in epidemiology.

When he arrived at CUNY SPH to pursue a PhD in community health and health policy, Vu sought out the mentorship of Professor Victoria Ngo, director of the CUNY SPH Center for Innovation in Mental Health (CIMH).

“New York was hard-hit by mental health issues during COVID-19, and I wanted to learn from Dr. Ngo’s hands-on work in implementing innovative models of mental health care in low-income and minoritized communities in Vietnam and New York City,” he says. “I was also drawn to CUNY SPH’s mission of promoting health equity and social justice, which continues to be an important focus of healthcare interventions.”

He took a position as a full-time research manager in CIMH, and has flourished under Ngo’s guidance, co-authoring eight peer-reviewed publications and 13 presentations with her.

Vu has also collaborated on publications with Associate Professors Pedro Mateu-Gelabert, Sean Haley, and Distinguished Professor Luisa Borrell. He marvels at how supportive the community at CUNY SPH has been.

“CUNY SPH is an amazing place,” he says. “The faculty are so approachable and available, and ready to help.”

He is grateful for the numerous funding sources he has been able to take advantage of at the school, including travel awards from his department, the dean’s office, the student government association, and the CUNY Student Senate. These awards have made it possible for Vu to attend international trainings and annual American Public Health Association (APHA) conferences.

Vu’s dissertation—for which he received a Dean’s Dissertation Award—centers around the experiences of cancer patients and the people who care for them. As with his other public health interests, this focus was inspired by direct experience, in this case witnessing family members’ battles with colon and lung cancer.

For two consecutive years, he was awarded CUNY’s Cancer Epidemiology Education in Special Populations (CEESP) fellowship for his research on mental health symptomatology among cancer patients and their family caregivers at oncological hospitals in Vietnam —an often overlooked and under-supported population in low- and middle-income countries with underdeveloped healthcare and social welfare systems.

In 2024, he received a Weill Cornell Medicine Career Advancement for Research in Health Equity award to further his research on tackling the mental health challenges faced by informal caregivers of hospitalized lung cancer patients in Vietnam. His contributions to cancer and international health research earned him the Cancer Public Health Student Award at APHA 2023 and Young Professional Award at APHA 2024.

 Vu’s global HIV research has also been recognized. Most recently, he received the International AIDS Society’s AIDS 2024 Educational Fund Scholarship, as well as a traineeship through the Fogarty-IeDEA Mentorship Program for 2024-2026.

His career goals are crystal clear: “I hope to promote health equity for BIPOC communities, mentor future underrepresented students and researchers, and conduct innovative research to advance health equity.”