We are grateful for Alicen Spaulding, PhD’13 (epidemiology), a mentor, alumna volunteer leader, and donor. Despite being busy with her career in public health and two growing children, Spaulding chose to give back to SPH. “I want to help right now because of the urgency the pandemic has shown us. In public health we need all the help we can get, and as quickly as possible, so let’s get people graduated and working.”
Why do you choose to give back to SPH? Share your reason(s) for giving back and say thank you to our community of supporters by posting on your favorite social media platform: #SPH40DaysGratitude
Alicen Burns Spaulding
by Jon Spayde
“I want to help right now because of the urgency the pandemic has shown us. In public health we need all the help we can get, and as quickly as possible, so let’s get people graduated and working.”
Alicen Burns Spaulding, PhD ‘13 (epidemiology) chose the field of public health because she is, in her words, “an extreme extrovert.”
“The more people I can be around, the better,” she says with a smile. “The idea of one-on-one patient interaction wasn’t as appealing to me as giving a lecture to hundreds of people at once. That sounded amazing!”
The deeper reason, she adds, was that “I love the big picture. I’m a strategic thinker, and I love that public health is into that. And I love the struggle for public health.”
As senior advisor and team lead at the Vaccine Research Center of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), Alicen is taking part in a big-picture endeavor that’s part of a significant struggle—using immunological research to “help prepare for the next pandemic,” she says.
She calls the position a “dream job,” a high point in a career that began with a stint in the Peace Corps in Paraguay, and continued with an MPH at Johns Hopkins and her PhD at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. Her career included an earlier three-year position at NIAID and five years as a scientific investigator at Children’s Minnesota.
It was all in service of a passion for research—outside of academia. “I wanted to be able to lead my own independent research, from idea to publication, rather than teach,” she says, “and I was only really going to be able to do that with a PhD.” At SPH, she had teachers and mentors she remembers with deep gratitude and a dissertation fellowship that made it possible to, as she puts it, “dedicate the time I needed to finish and get out into the field, where I wanted to be.”
This gratitude is a major motivator for her giving back to SPH which she calls “a progression.” She began as a mentor to students the year she graduated and has been one ever since. She sits on the Alumni Society Board of Directors and is chair of its mentoring committee.
She sees mentoring as crucial in public health education, because the field is so varied, wide-open, and complex. “Public health is not a prescriptive field. In medical school you do the four years, the residency, it’s pretty formulaic. Public health is the opposite of that, which is exciting and terrifying. Biostatistics, environmental health, health policy, epidemiology; I mean, how are those even in the same school?” she laughs. “Students ask, ‘What am I supposed to do with this degree?’ I just want to help them decide. I want to lend my voice.”
Alicen also prioritizes giving to student scholarships because “I remember, like it was yesterday, the benefit, the freedom it gives you to say, okay, I don’t have to worry about paying this tuition bill. I’m left to focus on my academics.”
Alicen gives to SPH at a time of life when she’s intensely busy with a career peak and two growing children. But she didn’t want to wait till she was more settled—and COVID is part of the reason. “I want to help right now,” she says, “because of the urgency the pandemic has shown us. In public health we need all the help we can get, and as quickly as possible, so let’s get people graduated and working.”
