Harvard Chan C-CHANGE taps into the collective knowledge of student leaders at the Harvard Chan School, through our Student Ambassador Program.
This year-long program equips Harvard Chan master and doctoral students with critical skills to become climate and health leaders. The program cultivates a community of students at Harvard Chan who are interested in climate change, strengthens the connections between the Center and departments across the school, and helps students understand how climate change impacts their respective fields of study.
Student Ambassadors
Doctoral Student of Public Health
Eirliani Abdul Rahman (aka “Lin”) is a final-year student in the doctoral program in public health (DrPH). She would like to leverage the C-CHANGE program to bring attention to climate change as an important risk factor for human trafficking. Her diplomatic experience, having served in the Singapore Foreign Service, coupled with working for the Nobel Peace laureate Kailash Satyarthi, gives her a unique perspective on public health challenges, especially the link between human trafficking and poor health. A Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts, she loves exploring the Arctic and trained with renowned polar explorers Matty McNair and Sarah McNair-Landry over two winters in Nunavut, Arctic Canada. Lin plans to ski the last degree to the North Pole post-graduation to raise awareness on child sexual abuse, being a survivor herself.
Masters Student in Environmental Health
Claire Dinehart is a second-year Master’s student in the Environmental Health department. She graduated from the University of Utah in 2021 with dual degrees in Environmental & Sustainability Studies and Psychology. Her main area of interest is in the characterization of environmental health exposures and their distribution throughout local communities. She is currently working with the National Studies on Air Pollution and Health group to research the impacts of extreme temperature events on Parkinson’s disease-related hospitalizations.
Masters Student in Health Management
Jess Freedman is an MPH student at Harvard T. H. Chan, in the department for Health Policy and Management. Jess is a mathematician by background, she graduated from the University of Oxford with a BA Hons in Mathematics and Statistics in 2016. Jess started her career in strategy consulting, specializing in Healthcare. For the past couple of years, Jess has been working in venture capital, leading Digital Health and ClimateTech investments for an early-stage fund. She is passionate about the intersection of public health and climate change and believes that system change requires tight coordination across the private sector, NGOs, governments, and activists. C-Change offers the opportunity to collaborate with students and academics across different disciplines to spark system change.
Doctoral Student in Population Health Sciences
Hana Lee is a second-year PhD student in the Population Health Sciences program at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She received her MPH in Epidemiology from Emory Rollins School of Public Health and worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention, and Emory Health Services Research Center prior to joining Harvard. Her research interests include using spatial analyses and methods to assess multiple exposures to understand the link between disparities in environmental exposures and health outcomes. Hana is also interested in implementation science as a tool to effectively translate research findings to practice.
Masters Student in Environmental Health
Cynthia Ma is a first-year Master of Science student in Environmental Health at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. She is primarily interested in the health implications of climate change and wants to build on her undergraduate research on household air pollution to better understand the complex interaction between energy, climate change, and health. Cynthia received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Environmental Studies from Boston College. In her free time, she enjoys taking dance classes, hiking, and baking.
Masters Student in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Janice Mok is an MPH student at Harvard University, concentrating in Social and Behavioral Sciences. She is also a resident physician in Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Queen’s University in Canada, and is trained as a family physician. She is currently working with C-CHANGE on a project about climate change preparedness in the Philippines. She has an interest in healthy built environments, communicable diseases, and the intersection between social determinants of health and climate change, at the local level as well as globally.
Doctoral Student in Nutrition
Nile Nair is a final year International PhD candidate from Fiji in the Nutrition Department with a focus in Nutritional and Genetic Epidemiology. His initial work at Harvard involved studying the effects of climate change and the accelerated nutrition transition on indigenous populations in the Pacific region through the lens of dietary colonialism, coral reef health and evolutionary mismatch theory. His current work examines the nexus of climate justice, human nutrition, and planetary health, whereby he’s validating a Planetary Health Diet Index (EAT-Lancet 2019) and investigating the cardiometabolic health outcomes of a planetary conscious diet. Through C-Change, Nile hopes to further his advocacy for more sustainable dietary guidelines with the goal of reducing the greenhouse impact of global food systems. Part of this work also endeavors to address the structural violence that the current climate crisis embodies and its effects on minority groups in the US and around the world.