Stephanie Richard MHS

A lifelong sailor, Stephanie Richard is taking boating classes these days—after years of shipping out with her father as captain, she wants to take the helm on her own.

The roundabout professional course she’s set is equally ambitious. During college, she lived in Germany for a summer and worked on an alternative energy project. Later, she moved to Hunan, China, to teach English and edit grant proposals at a research hospital. It was there that seeing the massive burden of hepatitis B in the local population sparked her interest in public health. Back in the States and working an office job, she started taking night classes at Harvard, won a full scholarship to attend a graduate-level training course in public health in Hawaii, and eventually earned her Master of Health Science degree from Hopkins in 2004. Since 2006, she’s been analyzing influenza mortality data at the NIH’s Fogarty International Center. As a Sommer Scholar, she is looking forward to honing her analytical skills on understanding the relationship between malnutrition and infectious disease. “The prospect of having several years to devote to exploring a specific global health research question is very exciting.”