Student Profile: Alejandra Hernández

The Journal of Public Health Managment

The Journal of Public Health Management published the winners of the Students Who Rock Public Health -- selecting students and their projects that reflect the best of 2020. Students put their talents to good use helping a whole range of urgent public health efforts to mitigate the virus and help keep people safe during the pandemic. Alejandra Hernandez, 2022 MPH candidate, was cited for Black Tech Matters' MIT Hacking Racism in Healthcare, a 2-day virtual hackathon, which brought together a global community to shed light on a root cause of bias in healthcare.

Alejandra Silva Hernández, a Master of Public Health student at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, and her team were one of the winners in the Data Bias and Clinical Research and Trials track.

The National Hispanic Health Foundation

The National Hispanic Health Foundation (NHHF) of the National Hispanic Medical Association honored Columbia Mailman School’s Alejandra Silva Hernández, a first-year MPH student at its 17th Annual Ceremony held virtually on November 19th. The association presents scholarships to outstanding Latinx health professional students who have transformed their community and demonstrated academic excellence, leadership, and a commitment to providing healthcare to Latinx communities.

Alejandra is a first-generation student in the accelerated General Public Health Program. Earlier in the semester, her team pitched one of the winning solutions in the Data Bias and Clinical Research track at the MIT Hacking Racism in Healthcare Hackathon, a two-day virtual event to dismantle racial injustice in healthcare delivery and address the social determinants of health. In the spring semester, she will be working with Sandra Albrecht, assistant professor of epidemiology, as a translator for the “Dear Pandemic” website, introducing new content for the Spanish-speaking community. After graduation from Columbia Mailman School, she intends to apply to medical school.

The United Health Foundation and Centene Corporate are the Major Sponsors of the award; other sponsors include NovoNordisk, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Kaiser Permanente, and American Heart Association among other institutions. NHHF is an arm of the National Hispanic Medical Association, a nonprofit organization that represents 50,000 Hispanic physicians across the U.S. The mission of NHHF is to improve the health of Hispanics through research and educational activities.