Rutgers School of Public Health alumna Claire Brown, MPH, leads student experiences, career services and alumni engagement – building a culture of wellness and purpose across the school community
Each April, the Rutgers School of Public Health’s Office of Career Services features alumni whose work is advancing health and well-being locally and globally. Launched in 2021, Alumni April brings together students, alumni, faculty and community partners through stories and events that showcase diverse career paths and the many ways public health professionals drive impactful change.
This year’s Alumni April theme, Humans of Rutgers School of Public Health, centers the human stories behind public health – highlighting non-traditional journeys, interdisciplinary careers and the people-first values that shape the profession. These leaders illustrate the many ways our alumni bring public health values into varied roles and sectors, while keeping people and communities at the heart of what they do.
Among them is Claire Brown, MPH, Director for Student Experiences, Public Health Practice & Alumni Affairs at Rutgers School of Public Health and the founder of the school’s Office of Career Services and the Alumni April initiative.
For Brown, public health is deeply rooted in storytelling, and this approach continues to shape her work with students and alumni today. That same perspective is reflected in Alumni April, where storytelling connects the school’s community with the real, human experiences behind the public health workforce.
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Tell us a bit about yourself and your background.
I am a higher education leader working at the intersection of student affairs, public health, and dimensional wellness. As Director of Student Experiences, Public Health Practice, & Alumni Affairs at the Rutgers School of Public Health, I have spent the past seven years building a culture of personal and professional wellness through innovative career services. I founded the school's first Office of Career Services and developed career-advising, exploration, and training programs tailored to the diverse professional pathways of thousands of public health students and alumni.
With more than a decade of research and practice experience in student affairs and college health promotion, my professional mission is to learn and implement best practices for training healthy, happy, and highly effective student communities. I am especially passionate about using dimensional wellness as a framework for public health career growth, identity, and satisfaction.
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I co-led the Rutgers School of Public Health’s student-focused response efforts, initially helping to place student volunteers into NJ’s local health departments and ultimately working to hire the first 1,000 contact tracers in the NJ COVID-19 Community Contact Tracing Corps. I also championed new best practices in alumni engagement and graduate student well-being through signature programs such as Alumni April and Wellness PHirst.
I earned my Master of Public Health in Social and Behavioral Health Sciences from Rutgers in 2019, receiving the annual Goldstein Award for my concentration and induction into the Delta Omega honorary society for public health. In 2022, I received the Rutgers School of Public Health’s Distinguished Staff Award and was recognized as one of Rutgers Magazine’s 12 Under 40 Alumni.
... I started Alumni April in 2021 when public health students needed a healthy dose of hope. That need is even stronger now. This year's theme and expanded scope were an opportunity to tap into what has always been the most meaningful part of Alumni April - getting to hear very real, human stories about the myriad of personal and professional experiences our School of Public Health community has.
Claire Brown, MPH
Director for Student Experiences, Public Health Practice & Alumni Affairs, Rutgers School of Public Health
How did your non-traditional path shape your public health career?
My experiences in academia began as a Classical Civilization major at Boston University. School being a safe haven for me made teaching a natural career path, and I’d excelled in Latin in high school. I thought I'd follow in the footsteps of my favorite classroom teacher - Mr. Mack - by becoming a high school foreign language or history teacher. Although I soon realized that I enjoyed learning how to support students outside the classroom more than what I was supposed to be teaching them in the classroom, I still found a home in my classics courses. I was surrounded by advocates who understood that passion - not profit - is what makes a career path a relevant one.
The questions that the public health workforce is grappling with right now - How do I communicate the value of this degree? Why is this pathway still worth it, despite the hurdles and threats to stability and funding? - are questions that humanities students and scholars have already been pressured to answer for decades. When I first ventured into public health, Stephanie Nelson and Sophie Klein, my academic mentors during undergraduate years, cheered me on even as my career path shifted away from the world of classics and towards public health. No matter how alone and anxious I felt throughout the semesters as I questioned myself and my career, they were there to provide both humor and help. I now try to channel that blend as I help Rutgers SPH students navigate the stress of the public health job market.
My final semester classics courses - a senior seminar on the tragedian Sophocles (taught by Stephen Esposito) and a course on Ancient Medicine (taught by James Uden) - helped everything fall into place. I learned about using the catharsis of Greek tragedy as combat therapy, profiling ancient natural disasters to examine emergency response and lived experiences of personal loss and public environmental destruction, and challenging the Hippocratic Oath in response to a pressing obligation for healthcare providers to address social determinants of health.
We're seeing this on a broader scale right now with the recent award-winning novel-turned-film, Hamnet. At its core, Hamnet is a story of public health humanities - a story of how epidemics breed not just morbidity and mortality, but also very diverse, very viscerally human responses to the grief and isolation caused by such destruction. Organizations like Theater of War have formalized the reimagining and reading of Greek tragedies and other theatrical works as a tool for public health understanding and intervention.
Ultimately, I pursued an MPH because of my humanities degree, not in spite of it or as an alternative to it. And it was truly the human beings - my mentors and professors from that time - that made the difference.
Why did you create Alumni April, and why does this year’s theme elevate its purpose?
Public health saves lives, but the arts and humanities make them worth living. Humanizing public health means always prioritizing purpose over profit and remembering why we do what we do on the most fundamental levels.
Claire Brown, MPH
Alumna, Rutgers School of Public Health
I like to jokingly say that I created Alumni April because my humanities and health educator heart loves a good alliterative moment - that's not entirely untrue, but the real reason is that I started Alumni April in 2021 when public health students needed a healthy dose of hope. That need is even stronger now.
This year's theme and expanded scope was an opportunity to tap into what has always been the most meaningful part of Alumni April - getting to hear very real, human stories about the myriad of personal and professional experiences our School of Public Health community has. Over the years, I'm proud to have highlighted over 100 alumni and counting, and I am looking forward to expanding this year's Humans of Rutgers School of Public Health series beyond Alumni April to include faculty, staff and students as well.
What does “humanizing public health” mean to you?
Public health saves lives, but the arts and humanities make them worth living. Humanizing public health means always prioritizing purpose over profit and remembering why we do what we do on the most fundamental levels. One of the main reasons why I work at the intersection of student affairs and public health is that schools have often been a safe place for me, especially during times when humanity starts to feel inhumane.
To me, humanizing public health means doing what I can, in my small corner of the universe, to help make our school a happy and healthy place to be — one where emerging public health professionals can find support and solace in a world that now seems to face large-scale tragedy on a nearly daily basis.
What’s one piece of advice you’d give to those pursuing a career in public health?
If you’re wondering if there’s a place for you in public health, remember that to be non-traditional is one of public health’s greatest traditions. You will be a better public health professional because of your lived experiences and interdisciplinary perspectives, not in spite of them. A humanities major isn’t just a supplement or stepping stone to the health and helping professionals - it is a critical and creative foundation to protecting the well-being of all people.
