December 1, 2021 | Erin Bluvas, bluvase@sc.edu
South Carolina born and raised, Briana Thompson Ford is committed to advancing public health programming and advocacy for residents in her state and beyond. After graduating from the Governor’s School of Arts and Humanities, Ford moved to Ohio to study psychology at Oberlin College. It was during her sophomore year, while engaged in a research fellowship, that she was first introduced to the field of public health.
“We studied the ways that messaging strategies, metaphors and framing can impact how people understand public messages, and we even published a paper specifically related to how people understand causality of obesity based on the issue’s framing,” Ford says. “I loved my research topic, and I do think health education and promotion is important, but I was so interested in following up on the implications of the public health issue with advocacy.”
The great thing about public health is, not only is there a lot of overlap between the subject areas, but they actually depend on each other in practice to be successful.
-Briana Thompson Ford, MPH in HSPM student
After graduating in 2016, Ford returned to Columbia where she worked as a Medicaid claims analyst at the South Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. While attending a workshop on reporting that was led by a UofSC professor, Ford learned about the Arnold School’s Master of Public Health (MPH) in Health Services Policy and Management (HSPM) program.
Around the time she enrolled in the program, Ford accepted a position as a health research analyst with UofSC’s Institute for Families in Society. She spends her days helping organizations think through their complex problems to achieve real improvements related to health equity and outcomes, and she spends her evenings learning about the effectiveness of various public health programming and advocacy strategies.
Through her master’s program, Ford has found mentors in her department’s MPH director Kelli Kenison and workforce development associate/Ph.D. in HSPM doctoral candidate Zach Jenkins. “Dr. Kenison is an unwavering source of light and encouragement while helping me discover my unique strengths and how I can leverage those into a productive career to succeed personally but also keeping an eye on the greater public health mission and carving out my own space within a network of talented, dynamic, passionate professionals,” Ford says. “Zach Jenkins has helped to ground me and keep me connected with other like-minded students, particularly in the face of the unique challenges of pursuing this degree during the pandemic in a mostly virtual environment.”
Folks in public health are coming from such a diversity of backgrounds and experiences, and we all are putting it together for a common cause.
-Briana Thompson Ford, MPH in HSPM student
These connections are one of Ford’s favorite aspects of the public health field. Through her professional and academic experiences, she has discovered the diversity and overlapping nature of both the field and its people.
“The great thing about public health is, not only is there a lot of overlap between the subject areas, but they actually depend on each other in practice to be successful,” Ford says. “Folks in public health are coming from such a diversity of backgrounds and experiences, and we all are putting it together for a common cause. Even though we are all interested in generally improving population health, there is such rich diversity of thought and perspectives, from humanities to STEM, medicine to law, local and global interests. No matter where someone is coming from, there is almost certainly a contribution to be made in the world of public health, and I am grateful to be a part of such a plentiful pool of expertise and thought.”