Te Asia Hunter
Community Needs Assessment Task Group Lead & Co-Founder, she/her/hers
Te Asia Hunter is a current Master of Public Health (MPH) candidate at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. She is in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences (SMS) with a certificate in Chronic Disease Epidemiology. She received her Bachelor of Sciences in Biomedical Sciences with a minor in sociology and a specialization in pre-medical studies from Quinnipiac University in 2019. Transitioning from the diversity that is characteristic to New York to a racially homogenous environment in the midst of Trump’s election to presidency, Colin Kaepernick’s anti-police brutality protest, and several instances of state-sanctioned violence targeting Black people that attracted national attention, it was at Quinnipiac where Te Asia grew increasingly frustrated at the lack of consideration for how social structures and inequities impact science and medicine.
As a first-generation college student, she had to navigate many experiences by herself and sought to inform high school students nearby her college about the many career options available to them. She received firsthand experience as to how race and class affects the healthcare system. During her sophomore year, she shadowed her local gynecologist where she noticed the disparity in sexual education and health between young minority girls/women and white girls/women. During her junior year, she traveled to Barbados and worked with the country’s Heart and Stroke Foundation. There, she observed that the efficiency of the Foundation’s outreach was poorer amongst lower-class residents- a group that could’ve benefited most from the organization’s resources.
Te Asia’s research interests include incarceration as a public health issue, the cycle of victimization amongst incarcerated women, racial disparities in cancer rates as a result of environmental racism, the effect of seeing the consistent murder of Black people in the age of social media activism on the psyches of Black people, and health equity and justice.