Class of 2019 students discuss their public health projects at the 2017 Public Health Projects Poster Session and Community Celebration. (Photo: Andy Duback)

The Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont hosted the Class of 2020's Public Health Projects Poster Session & Community Celebration and the 5th Annual Martin Luther King Health Equity Lecture on Wednesday, January 17, 2018.

College of Medicine students, faculty and staff, along with community agency partners and other guests attended the public health event, which will feature a display of posters summarizing 17 different group projects. Students and faculty mentors will be on hand at the event to answer questions and share findings.

With support from the Volunteer Center of the United Way of Northwest Vermont, medical student groups are partnered with community agencies to conduct projects  - using practical research methods - that address specific health needs in the community.

"This year's projects explored many of Vermont’s most challenging public health issues: radon in Vermont schools, knowledge about carbon monoxide poisoning, strategies to improve childhood nutrition, suicide prevention in Vermont middle and high schools, and opportunities to promote HPV vaccine," said Jan Carney, M.D., M.P.H., associate dean for public health and course director.

Immediately following the poster session & community celebration, the College's Office of Diversity & Inclusion presented the Health Equity Lecture, titled "What's Race Got to Do with Medicine?" by Dorothy Roberts, J.D., of the University of Pennsylvania.

Roberts is an acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law who holds joint appointments in Penn's Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School. She is author of Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century (New Press, 2011); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2002) and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997).