Puget Sound Master of Public Health Grad Supports Global Health Efforts

Alumni

Rebekah McCosby MPH’23 works with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, in Switzerland.

Rebekah McCosby MPH’23 likes to describe herself as a generalist. She began her undergraduate degree studying nursing, but quickly realized it wasn’t for her and switched to biology. After graduation, she worked in a community retail pharmacy and then in a cancer research lab at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle. She was always interested in the health sciences, but she found it hard to commit to any specific career path.

“I was applying to PhD programs and getting feedback that I didn’t have a clear enough focus of what I wanted to study. In the hard sciences, you could spend five years studying one molecule, and I realized I didn’t want to have such a limited scope,” McCosby says.

McCosby was still discerning her future career path when the COVID-19 pandemic struck. She saw the need for clear public messaging around the virus and public health initiatives. Seeing the gap between the science and public perceptions galvanized her to look into a career in public health, where she could help bridge that gap.

It was around this time that Rebekah discovered the Master of Public Health program at the University of Puget Sound. She reached out to the program’s director at the time, Cara Frankenfeld. She learned that Puget Sound’s program was brand new—and that students would have a chance to shape its trajectory.

“That was really exciting,” McCosby recalls. “It was apparent from my very first class that public health as a field is so expansive. I was very interested in disease, but someone else in my cohort wanted to focus on nutrition and food access. The umbrella of public health is big enough to encompass it all, so we had the freedom to pursue our own passions.”

University of Puget Sound's Master of Public Health program prepares culturally responsive graduates who promote health equity and community wellness.

Coming into the MPH program, McCosby knew she wanted to study global health, a field within public health that focuses on addressing health disparities at the largest scale. She was drawn to the emphasis on health equity and to the fact that the field itself is in a state of transition.

“We spend our entire first day problematizing the definition of global health,” says Assistant Professor of Public Health Sara Fischer, who teaches a course covering the subdiscipline. “Historically, global health has been the practice of wealthy countries running public health programs in low-income countries, but in recent years, the conversation has shifted toward decolonization and a focus on equity, rather than rich countries having all the answers.”

For her practicum, McCosby worked with a non-governmental organization providing high-impact health interventions to children in northwest Nigeria, where she gained her first real-world experience in the global health field. She graduated in 2023 as part of the Master of Public Health’s first cohort. That summer, she landed a prestigious internship with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, after her practicum supervisor encouraged her to apply. Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, Gavi is an international organization that works to improve access to vaccines around the world. Since 2000, Gavi has helped vaccinate more than a billion children in 78 countries. After accepting this internship, she packed up and moved to Switzerland.

"Public health is big enough to encompass it all, so we had the freedom to pursue our own passions."

“It’s still a little hard to believe,” she says. “I’m on a team that manages grants for technical assistance focusing on capacity building and skills transfer in-country. We do a lot of financial tracking and monitoring to make sure that country teams have submitted activities and budgets for their technical assistance needs, so that we can ensure that they get funding to support national immunization strategies.”

In her role with Gavi, she also gets to be a part of bigger conversations about how to ensure the long-term sustainability of vaccine programs, find ethical solutions to global health issues, and ultimately save the most lives.

“My work lies at the intersection of all of these things, and at the center of these debates within the global health community. Everyone has the best intentions, but we don’t always get it right, and we have to grapple with how to keep improving.”

Following her internship, McCosby was offered a consultancy role with Gavi working on civil society and community engagement. The goal of this team is to help Gavi assist organizations at the local level–who may be best placed to help vaccinate missed and marginalized communities—access funding as readily as large, international organizations.

McCosby credits her peers and the faculty in the Master of Public Health program with equipping her to succeed in the rapidly changing field of global health.

“It’s such an exciting time to be in global health and I think a lot about the conversations we had in the MPH program about equity and access. I try to bring that perspective with me every day when I go into the office. I got so much out of the program. It forced me to get out of my comfort zone, take risks, and ultimately do something with my life that’s meaningful.”

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