UA Student Team Receives Second in Global Health Case Competition

2017 Mar 30

Olivia Howell of Collierville was a member of a University of Alabama team that won second place in a Global Health Case Competition in Birmingham, Alabama, in February.

In Global Health Case Competitions, held across the country, teams of students receive a detailed description of a real-world public health challenge. They have about a week to prepare and present solutions to tackle that problem. This year's scenario was titled "Impact of Malnutrition in the First 1,000 Days on a Child's Health in Rural Ethiopia." Each team was asked to take on the identity of a nongovernmental organization working at the community level to address scarcity issues, promote healthy practices, and thus improve infant and early-childhood health.

This was the first year that a statewide Global Health Case Competition has been held. Hosted by University of Alabama at Birmingham's Sparkman Center for Global Health, it involved teams from six Alabama universities. At UA, team members were selected through an application process, and then divided into three teams - Team A, Team B and Team C. At the competition, UA's Team B was awarded second place. Team B was captained by Haley Loflin (International Studies/Management), and featured John Denton (Spanish), Maggie Holmes (biology), Olivia Grace Howell (ACS biochemistry/biology), Alex Huechteman (public health) and Donna Xia (chemical engineering).