Charuka Maheswaran

I fell in love with the capacity of public health to make vast differences in people’s daily lives when I volunteered as a physician in Tanzania 20 years ago. The memory of that stayed with me and when I was offered the opportunity to study public health here in B.C., I knew that it was destiny. Public health deals with health at the population and community levels and affects every single aspect of people’s lives, including water, food, shelter, climate, disease, education, parenting, safety and policy. Public health is the conduit by which the individual becomes universal and vice versa.

UBC’s Public Health and Preventive Medicine program provides the opportunity to learn both within academic and research institutions, as well as at distributed sites throughout the province. After all, you can’t practice public health without going into the communities where healthcare happens. We also have the opportunity to do a Master of Public Health at UBC as part of our program. This allows us to interact with other specialties and learn from diverse expertise to better inform the practice of public health, which in my mind is always stronger when varied viewpoints are incorporated.

My research is wide-ranging and encompasses many aspects of individual and community-level health, such as infectious disease, public health management and understanding the health impacts of climate change. A large part of my work focuses on synthesizing the latest research to help inform public health recommendations that will ultimately have a direct impact on people’s daily lives.

Any place to see the clearest possible views of the aurora borealis!