Public Health internship fellowship

This public health internship has you study how waste, water and air pollution affect health in a community near you, with a mentor who guides your method. You run household surveys, combine them with Earth5R’s field data and public health data, and write up what the evidence shows.

Internship fellowship
· Health

This public health internship has you study how waste, water and air pollution affect health in a community near you, with a mentor who guides your method. You run household surveys, combine them with Earth5R’s field data and public health data, and write up what the evidence shows.

For school and university students thinking about medicine, public health or health policy who want to study health where people live. Online, with field work near where you live. The fellowship is paid because every fellow receives time and attention from senior researchers and leaders.

See all 38 subjects Volunteers reviewing household survey forms beside a water drum in a settlement

Public Health and sustainability

Many environmental problems are also health problems. Uncollected waste and standing water give mosquitoes places to breed, and those mosquitoes spread dengue and malaria. Polluted air harms lungs and hearts, and unsafe water causes diarrhoeal disease, which hits young children hardest. Public health turns these links into evidence that a city can act on, by measuring who is affected and where.

Earth5R works in 150+ Indian cities. Its teams run door-to-door household surveys and waste audits, and the Earth5R app records them as photographed, geo-tagged data. One of its flagship research projects is a New York University researcher’s study of how data centres deepen water shortages in Maharashtra, and the burden this puts on women who fetch water. As a fellow you ask health questions of this kind of field data.

This work links to the UN Sustainable Development Goals:
Goal 3, Good health and well-being and Goal 6, Clean water and sanitation .

You join Earth5R’s live work through your own subject. Your mentor shapes the final project with you.

Combine public air quality data for your city with a survey of how people cook, travel and work, and estimate which groups face the most exposure to polluted air.

Visit an informal recycling unit, observe how waste is sorted, and study the health risks workers face from cuts, dust and heat, along with simple ways to reduce them.

Garbage-strewn lane Survey with a clipboard in a lane

The FIELDWORK method

Along the way you take part in research conversations with professors at MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, LSE and other universities, and ask your own questions. See how FIELDWORK works.

Your next step

• BSc in Public Health or Global Health
• MBBS or BSc in Nursing
• Master of Public Health (MPH)
• MSc in Epidemiology or Environmental Health
• PhD in public or environmental health

• Public health researcher
• Epidemiologist
• Environmental health officer
• Health programme manager
• Health policy analyst

Strong public health programmes look for applicants…