This past November, MPH student, Emma Schreier, won an APHA award from APHA’s Public Health Education and Health Promotion Section for the highest scoring student abstract! She presented her original study at the 2022 APHA Annual Meeting.

The title of Emma's presentation was "Flying under the radar: Sexual health promotion at public colleges and universities in the American South". This work originated as Emma’s undergraduate honors thesis at Tulane University, and she is now working on converting the study to a peer-reviewed manuscript.

An exerpt from Emma's abstract reads: "K-12 sexuality education in the American South leaves students ill-prepared for college, when sexual risk-taking is common. Health promotion offices at colleges and universities seek to fill this gap by providing education on a variety of sexual health topics. However, college health professionals often navigate an institutional or political climate that is unsupportive of comprehensive sexual health programming. This study sought to understand how professionals provide sexual health promotion in these environments."

To achieve this aim, Emma conducted semi-structured Zoom interviews with 16 college sexual health professionals employed at public, Southern institutions. Her full abstract can be found here.