A chance selection of a freshman seminar on environmental studies and a subsequent international experience opened Derek Shendell to entirely new ways of using his interest in science and medicine. Public health had been an unknown career path to him, but rather quickly he realized it was exactly how he wanted to make an impact in the world. Find out how looking beyond your own environment can sometimes help you see how you can do the most good.
A chance selection of a freshman seminar on environmental health made Derek Shendell recognize there were entirely new ways of using his interest in science and medicine. A subsequent international experience showed him first-hand how geography and other social factors were involved. Public health had been an unknown career path to him, but rather quickly he realized it was exactly how he wanted to make an impact in the world. Getting a little bogged down by joint MD/MPH programs, he stumbled a bit at the start but got on the right track and found he could make impact with a number of different lines of work, all focusing on shining light on inequities and doing good science to help shift policies to make society healthier.
In this episode, find out from Derek how looking beyond your own environment can sometimes help you see how you can do the most good…on today's Roads Taken with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode’s Guest
Derek Shedell is Professor and Concentration Leader for Environmental Health Sciences in the Department of Environmental & Occupational Health & Justice at the Rutgers School of Public Health. He is also the Director of the New Jersey Safe Schools Program there. He is widely published and continues churning out high-impact work.
For another story about seeing the world around you and wanting to make it healthier, listen to our episode with John Peoples.
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
Derek Shendell: I kind of started putting it all together and I went from being, you know, a science major with a Spanish minor in this environmental study certificate to being that, but wanting to use those for something moving forward. And what that became after talking with a few others was, oh, there's this thing called public health and the light bulbs were completely on.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: A chance selection of a freshman seminar and environmental studies and a subsequent international experience opened Derek Shendell to entirely new ways of using his interest in science and medicine. Public health had been an unknown career path to him, but rather quickly, he realized it was exactly how he wanted to make an impact in the world. Find out how looking beyond your own environment can sometimes help you see how you can do the most good on today's Roads Taken with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley.
Today I'm here with Derek Shendell and we are going to talk about how our eyes get opened to what is good and healthy and right in the world and what we do about it. So Derek, thanks so much for being here.
DS: Yes, of course. I've enjoyed listening to some of the podcasts you've done in the past with our mutual friends and, and others I didn't know at Dartmouth that I learned about from them. So happy to help out your project.
LJR: Yeah. And so that's what this is all about. So I ask of all of our guests the same two questions, and they are these: When we were in college, who were you? And when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would become?
DS: Start with the big questions, huh?
LJR: Yeah, exactly.
DS: Yeah. So I, I definitely think I was a diff…a slightly different person than now in some ways and in other ways I think I had to remind myself who I was in the latter stage of Dartmouth, 'cause I may have lost sight of that for a while. So long story short, you know, I was a, a public school kid, pre-K to 12 out of Stamford, Connecticut, which is a very good public school system, but surrounded by some of the wealthiest towns in the country, who are used to sending half a dozen, 10 people to all these elite schools every year. And I think in my school's case, no one had gotten into Dartmouth in five years. No one had gotten into Princeton at least five years. We had had people go to Yale and Harvard. So I think there was a lot of pressure on the, the higher performing students to really excel and, you know, it was very competitive. But that said, it was an amazing peer group that I was part of. So I think that. I was a city kid going to a rural school and I think at, while I was excited about that at first, I do think I had some challenges with that at different times in the first year or so. And then between the foreign study experience, which again was in a city abroad in Mexico, and then the off-campus experience, which ended up being, I guess junior winter down in the Raleigh Durham area, including Duke's Medical Center and different offices related to learning about sports med and injury prevention. I kind of got that city person back into me. In addition to just, you know, working at home over the summers and I think I had a better experience in many ways.
The second half of Dartmouth compared to the first, even though if I said that to my friends, they'd be like, what is he talking about? He was the same, you know, similar, outgoing, you know, leader among, you know, friends the whole time. But that wasn't the case. I think I did internalize some things and struggle with some things, but like I said, I think I kind of reminded myself that you can, there are some urban aspects to life, even when you go to a rural school and sometimes you have to just reconnect with that in your off terms. And I think that really helped me, which is why I think if people ask me, did, did I enjoy grad school better than undergrad, the answer will be yes, I'm sorry.
LJR: That’s alright.
DS: But having gone to New Haven for Yale, including being a summer in the cities of Guatemala for my master's research and then. Basically all my adult life has been in Atlanta, then to grad school again at UCLA, including stints in Berkeley lab, working in the Berkeley, Oakland area, which is completely urban until you're out in the field. And then back to Atlanta and then here in New Jersey being based in the cities, but of course working statewide, I've seen everything in New Jersey. So that's a quick initial answers to your first two questions. You can ask for details.
DS: Okay. I will. And we're getting ahead of ourselves, so we'll go back though. So when we were getting ready to leave, I think we've, we've hopped, skipped, and jumped over some of the content stuff that's gonna put those urban experiences into context. So when, I think you had mentioned to me when you were first on that Mexico LSA, some light bulbs were starting to fire for you.
DS: Yes.
LJR: So talk to me about kind of that and the string that kind of came from that experience.
DS: Absolutely. So it starts a little before that though.
LJR: Okay.
DS: If you don't mind.
LJR: No.
DS: So freshman spring, like many people, if you did your English requirement in the winter, you did the seminar requirement. You probably remember that, Leslie, and so, I don't remember what the other choice was, but I remember there being like two choices I was given and one of them was whatever the other one was. And one of them was something about the African environment with a professor in environmental studies who had done a lot of work in Kenya and Tanzania, which has a lot of rural aspects, but clearly involves some mega…what are now considered megacities, including Nairobi. And I remember asking one of my tennis teammates who, that was the captain that year, Sam Cook. I'm like, you know Sam, didn't you take freshman seminar with Professor Miller? And he is like, oh yeah. You know, you'll really enjoy that. You should take that one and not the other one. Glad I listened to Sam. That seminar really got me interested in environmental health aspects of health. I definitely—like many people who come in interested in chemistry or chemistry and biology, and I was more chemistry at that point—I was thinking either pre-med or pre-environmental law, something like that. But he opened my eyes. Then my eyes really got open on the foreign study to come back to your original question. So I think it took me a while to understand what I was seeing and why it was bothering me. But, you know, having to take a bus ride with my friends, Kendra Cheves, she's changed her last name to Miller.
LJR: I think she’s one of the Millers.
DS: …Miller, and then a class of 95, Joanna Klein, who, I don't know her married name, but anyway, we were on the same bus. I think John Peoples was on that bus, that route too. Wow. So we were seeing things, or I was seeing things that really stuck with me like that. You know, going from a historical city to the urban periphery that basically transitioned, what I learned later was going from the industrialized or first world to the third, or what was better termed less developed country, urban periphery, which is really you know, totally different. And if you were on the bus a little too long, sometimes, like Kendra and I a few times found ourselves and you didn't wanna get off 'cause you didn't really know what you were getting yourself into. You went back to the main stop and then, you know, kind of walked from there, which I remember at least doing twice with Kendra. But I think over time, once I learned more in some of the distributive classes at Dartmouth, so taking medical anthropology junior year, a sociology class about various aspects of health. And then finishing the environmental study certificate, I kind of started putting it all together and I went from being, you know, a science major with a Spanish minor in this environmental study certificate to being that, but wanting to use those for something moving forward. And what that became after talking with my friends, Matt Garabedian, who was a Sig Ep like me and his girlfriend at the time, Lisa Stigler and a few others, was, oh, there's this, this thing called public health. I audited. Professor Coop's class 'cause I didn't have time to fit it in senior fall, I audited a couple lectures.
LJR: C. Everett Coop.
DS: Yeah. And pretty much the life bulbs were completely on by senior fall. So I quickly transitioned all my applications to literally to dual degree MD/MPH, which in hindsight was probably a mistake to try to get into med school, 'cause then everything got delayed. But I think it was also a sign, Leslie, so net-net got into all the public health programs and got waitlisted or not into the medical. And I took that as a sign like, yep, that was the right decision I should pursue the public health. Then it just became where I went. So I chose Yale over Emory or Columbia for public health and I've never looked back. And I was able, super fortunate. Long story short, I was able to work with the late Kirk Smith from Berkeley as an outside member to my master's thesis. And then my primary mentors at Yale for the thesis. Brian leader, who ended up becoming deputy dean and an interim dean. And then my now colleague, Luke Ner, is at University of Georgia to learn about air quality and health, not in the rural setting where they were focused, but in the urban setting. And that's where I think the whole air quality and built environment aspect of my career really just took off. And yeah, I ended up going back to indoor air for my doctoral work and schools is a whole nother thing, but getting to use to C D C the first time around and to UCLA was based on that master's work abroad. And what I learned, you know, not even just doing the research, but at Paho, observing how they did micronutrient supplementation with kids or how they intervened in people's homes with improved cook stoves and ventilation. Yeah, so I'm talking fast, but I think all of that goes back to taking that freshman seminar with an environmental studies professor and then figuring out what I had learned in Mexico, just from those bus rides and being part of an old city that's really on the fringe of being in a less developed country at that point, parts of Mexico, with everything I was learning at Dartmouth in those distributive classes. True value of liberal arts education. I guess I benefited from that. 'cause anywhere else you get science major. Dartmouth forced you to take all those distributive and social sciences and humanities and. In my opinion, I was a…I benefited from that and I still do in terms of what we've had to do during Covid. So that's a whole nother conversation.
LJR: Yeah. That's right. Because you were actually able to take all those experiences and weave them into a story that felt coherent and like explained almost the reasons why you, you kind of knew maybe medicine, maybe environmental health, but what that would look like, like really blossomed when you got those other tastes of sociology and, you know, embedding in a community and, and all the things that kind of liberal arts afforded.
DS: Yeah. The, the medical anthrop. And so what's interesting about medical anthrop, I, I wanna give another shout out. The adjunct who taught medical anthrop at the time, junior fall, she, among other things, brought Paul Farmer to speak at Dartmouth.
LJR: I remember that.
DS: I read his book that talks about basically how AIDS did not come from Haiti. In fact, AIDS was probably brought to Haiti as part of the, the old triangle between slaves coming from Africa and tobacco and rum going other places. And so if anything, the industrialized rule was responsible for bringing AIDS to Haiti and other places like the us. But anyway, that was also transformative. I mean, and there were other really cool guest speakers, but to have him there earlier in his career, 'cause he had known Brenda Schwab when they were both at Harvard, I think was I. The connection there and to read that book among others. That also opened my eyes. 'cause at that point, The only less developed country I'd been to personally was Mexico. And you know, we lived in a historical, beautiful city with host families, but we traveled around and saw things, so that was a really opening experience. So I think just, yeah, those various distributive classes and you know, going to Professor Miller's house and meeting the guests he had from Africa and seeing his stuff. I even missed our team, Ivy League championship. Dinner to go to that. That's also a true story. And while I am sorry that happened 'cause I also had to get to lab later that night. Those two things combined meant I had to stop by Coach Kenyon and Coach Jones the next day to pick up something. I'm again, I'm so glad I did and I apologized to all my teammates and I, I was junior varsity, not varsity at that point. It didn't, in my opinion, this was more important, but what I learned that night, And the fact that I've now got 12 papers from my work over a decade with Nigeria, I think that would've, some of that would've never happened if I hadn't had my eyes open, you know, that freshman spring and, and, and also going to his house that night and seeing all that stuff.
LJR: Yeah. And then you put that to use, so you knew kind of the M P H work. Was gonna take you wherever it was gonna take you. So let's fast forward a little bit to now and we can fill in some of those gaps. So what is the work that you're doing now? And then we'll talk foundations of how it kind of got there.
DS: Yeah, sure. So I was one of the founding faculty members at Georgia State University’s Institute of Public Health, which was gonna be a master's program. So at the time, the Regents of Georgia formed a school, full school at UGA, being the flagship—Go Bulldogs with all the sports. And then they had programs at, you know, three other sites to compliment the one private school at Emory, which is a surprise because Atlanta is literally the epicenter public health globally, even with some of the pluses and minuses during covid with CDC.
But my wife is also a talented professional. She's an executive in the private sector at that connection between business and information technology, and CNN is where she ended up going when we moved from California to Atlanta, and they wanted to promote her within six months to run CNN money, the website in New York. [LJR: Oh.] Versus what she was doing in Atlanta, which was her turn. Great opportunity. So I came to, what was UMDNJ because of connections I had back from grad school, being a project manager, as a student within this professional doctoral program. And they were hap…they just happened to be doing a faculty search. So while there was a gap, in terms of following Margaret to this area, that all worked out. I finished my two plus years at Georgia. We got accredited. I even finished teaching that academic year, made some trips back, finished some at least research, data collection, and then also kind of started here. So at one point with the deal between the deans, I think I was officially 120%, but it was totally worth it 'cause they got accredited and I was able to kind of hit the ground running here. And so I've been here and now UMDNJ became Rutgers Biomedical and Health Science. The difference is when I was at Georgia State, I was tenured track in a master's program. We were all new core founding faculty. Here I’m what's called clinical scholar, which means I'm not a tenure track physician or, you know, a peer researcher I'm sort of a combined academic practitioner, but that's a blessing in disguise too. So I wear a couple hats. At this point. I've gone from assistant to associate to full professor, so hard work does pay off folks. I'm also the long-term director of what's known as New Jersey Safe Schools Program. So that is an interdisciplinary, multifaceted program, primarily funded by both the state and federal departments of education and…Easiest way to explain the federal part is the state is one of these grantees for what's known as the Perkins funding that goes through all career technical vocational education, and we are basically a subcontractor or part of that grant to deliver all the safety and health child labor, law, wage and hour and some special add-ons to those schools that are also receiving Perkins money. Everything else we do based on state funds is more statewide, including new programs and, you know, just maybe schools that don't have programs that might need to send students to a private academy for cosmetology or to a specialized school, like if it's a student with a disability or special healthcare needs. So we have multiple funding sources, multiple calendars, and then we've gotten grants from foundations and other things, too. And then the other hat I wear is I lead our master's concentration in environmental health science. So it's kind of full circle, right? In our school, Leslie, we have fewer departments and many concentrations, so every department more or less has anywhere from three to five concentrations. We house environmental health, occupational safety, which is a colleague of mine, and then our medical residency program out of Robert Wood Johnson is also based in our department, so that's its own master's concentration is they basically get a master's in public health while they're doing their residency. So those are the hats 'cause it's Rutgers and everybody wears many hats. And then, you know, obviously I teach and mentor and all those kind of things for the school.
LJR: And do research.
DS: Yeah, the research is definitely connected to the Safe Schools program for the most part. So it's a combination. Pre covid, we had field research. During and post covid we had to, we had to transition. So we've gotten a lot of course evaluation and research surveys, which need IRB approval 'cause you're talking about teachers and potentially teachers and students statewide. But my last field study was actually completed, thank goodness, the winner of 2020, and it took us time to finish processing the data and get the one paper out about it, but we were kind of banned from the field, especially if you're talking about someone who does research inside and outside schools. Until now we're starting to talk with schools again and what can we get going? Everyone had to transition during Covid.
LJR: Well, of, of course, but you, during Covid were actually doing research that could have a potential for a big impact, right?
DS: You know, so, so I'm sure that some of my Dartmouth friends who I love dearly are probably not happy with me 'cause I didn't maybe have as…It's not that I didn't have empathy, I think I was a little disappointed that some people were like, oh, well where we live, it's, it's okay 'cause our kids are all getting Chromebooks or you know, this is happening or that's happening and, and I was, you know, on these calls trying to, you know, we're all connecting 'em. Kinda like, well that's great, but what do I tell the teachers in Newark or Patterson or Jersey City who have none of that? And, and I think it was hard for me to separate work from family and friends at that point 'cause it was just so all encompassing. And so I just asked through this podcast for their forgiveness. I'm sure I've gotten it. But I think it was hard for me in those first few months 'cause it was really…there was a lot on our plates that we were asked to help with and it was all hands on deck. I mean, there's no other way to explain it. But it was very hard to separate, like work from family or work from family and friends. I'll be the first to admit it. But yeah, so I mean to, to all those folks that didn't have it as bad, I am happy for you and for all the folks we couldn't help, I can just simply say we did the best we could. And it's just as I told my only primary mentor in California who's now retired, I'm like, you know, I'm glad we were able to do all this work and help a lot of people, but a million more dive and should have. I mean, I think it's just hard for anyone in public health to just sort of see these stats and know that we've done the epi and we understand how things improved and we've documented it, my team included, but a lot of people died that shouldn't have. And we lost some of our own staff here. It's not that Oh, Rutgers public health, we protected you.
LJR: Yeah. But you had the added bonus of not only kind of the, the death toll taking its mental toll, but also, you know, you know, the ramifications of the school closures and all the stuff on our children's education, mental health, all of that. And so it was the double. Yeah.
DS: Yeah, we did some research on it. Yeah. We have a paper on it. If you're interested. Send me an email, I'll send you the reprint. But before the state changed its dashboard, we did the analysis based on what was being released publicly through NJ Spotlight. We kept track of it all. We basically showed that school-based transmission was driven by the community transmission. It was not based on what was going on at the school. So it was just one of many lines of evidence suggesting that if we had the ventilation in place and we had some of the other layers in place, maybe we didn't need to close the schools. I mean, that would be one of the arguments you can make. And other people have done research too, but I think it was important, at least in New Jersey to show that community level transmission was driving what was going on in the schools. Having Labor Day weekend parties in 2020, even if they were outdoors with a lot of people around, probably—And it did—drove the case rates the following week or two in terms of the data. So, yeah we learned a lot. Like I said, we did whatever we could to take…it’s unfortunate to say it this way, Leslie. We took advantage of opportunities when we could to help do good science for with the agency or for the agencies and get it out there. But all of that takes time. As fast as we were working, it all takes time like any other research does and I know you know that. We're just gonna have to make sure we've learned these lessons [LJR: Yes.] for next time, whatever that may be. And maybe CDC will have to deal with it in another country before we deal with it here. But there's…I have other colleagues who have worked on Monkeypox and some, or M-Pox, sorry, and some of these other things where lessons learned have already been applied. And obviously the results show that we've been more successful, but that's not really what I do. So it'll have to be either school-based or airborne for me to be part of the next one, I guess.
LJR: Yeah. Well, I hope that, I hope you don't get overworked on that, because I'd like to not see that right away. Yeah.
DS: Fingers crossed. Let's if we do more prevention, which announced the prevention is worth a pound or more of cure, let's hope we can avoid it, you know?
LJR: There you go.
DS: That would be the ideal, right? Public health. If we do more public health, we need clinicians. We need surgeons. No doubt about it. It needs to be a partnership, but I think none of us want to deal with something like covid again, in our lifetimes. Let's, let's be honest.
LJR: So, I mean, COVID brings up a great example of how public health, of course, can touch everybody. But I will say kind of in those early machinations in your mind, when this was kind of like, oh, you know, what am I seeing and why is it important to me? Why is it making me feel this way? Some of those I think I'm hearing are tied to kind of this…the idea of inequities in health and I would say you're probably…like that started with this geographic idea of urban versus exurban versus whatever. And you could see the gradations of access and equity there. But now I would say the nexus of all of this is these schools cannot possibly be equitable in terms of who's getting access to what. [DS: Yup.] And so again, again, you're seeing that thing just not so much from a urban, rural dichotomy, like a different lens. Is that fair to say?
DS: Yeah. I think you're like everyone else we went to at Dartmouth, you're very intelligent. Yeah. I think what's interesting about New Jersey, and I've had to learn this 'cause every state's different. So New Jersey is big about this idea of home rule, which I'm not sure is the exact term that was coined a long time ago, but I've heard people use it. It means, in my mind it means the local level, school districts, whether it's town or city or combined cities called regional or even a county district, say for special services or career technical, vocational, they have more power, both politically in terms of decision making than the state agencies. And so that creates some challenges. It also creates some opportunities and benefits depending on what you're talking about. So in New Jersey, because so much of it is technically a suburb of either New York City or Philadelphia or arguably, you know, maybe the big university cities like New Brunswick, Edison or, you know, you have that Jersey City, Hoboken, which is, you know, very urban, but people are basically living there to go to New York. There's different dynamics, and so within those areas you might have. Inequities like within Newark, within Jersey City, within Hoboken. You also have differences between the rural agricultural areas. I mean, some people don't know, and I didn't, before I moved here, maybe you did: New Jersey is one of the top five agricultural production states in the country. I mean, you think of California, you think of. Florida for different fruits and other things. And then you've got Washington State and Oregon and
LJR: Garden State. Yeah.
DS: New Jersey I think has been five and a lot of people's rankings when you consider the summer season and some of the other things going on. So New Jersey is definitely within that top five, top 10, depending on the time of year. So you have that rural area like that. So there's definitely urban, rural differences, but there I would agree with you that there's more of the, the income gradations, but also New Jersey's a very diverse state. So, yeah, there's definitely different ways of defining equity or inequity. And then you have just historical legacies that were…is there a Superfund site in your community? If you're along some of these roads, you may have easily been able to get a job at one of these Amazon or other warehouses. But at the same time, there are environmental implications to all these things that some of us have done research on.
LJR: So I tend to ask people to get a little retrospective. So if I were to plop you back into our very rural environment and you could approach your 20-something Derek who in some way was jonesing for urban culture and urban centers and showed him the path that you've taken from then to now. What do you think his reaction to all of it would've been?
DS: God, that's a tough question. I definitely know I would've been less stressed about certain things. This is hard for me to talk about, but I will 'cause you're a friend and it's important. People hear stories, but like, I wasn't a friend to Sarah Devons, but we all know what happened there. She passed away and I don't know the details, but that was traumatic. As a student athlete, that was traumatic. But one of my own teammates, Dan Boyer, took his own life as a sophomore in my other sport. And I think all of us, whether we admit or not, Could get depressed at times or have some challenges, whether it was, in my case, more family related stuff that I internalized and had trouble talking about or getting help about. It had really nothing to do with Dartmouth. It was more what was going on back in Connecticut, really starting late in my sophomore fall and really coming to a head while we were in Mexico, which just made it kind of worse for me in terms of dealing with that. I think if I could go back and talk to that mid sophomore year, junior year, Derek, I would've sort of maybe explained to him what I now know was going on in the family or what may have, you know, could never have been dealt with appropriately even now. And also said, Hey, you know, ask questions about public health. Try to get more information about other things you can do with chemistry and this environmental science stuff you're starting to learn about through the chemistry department and through that freshman seminar. And while I eventually figured out some of it in my own, thank goodness with those distributive courses in the social sciences, I think I would've been less stressed about trying to figure it all out and maybe gotten maybe a little bit of a head start on what the next steps would be versus perhaps wasting energy and time on combined degree applications. I would've just focused on only the master's in public health and maybe tried to get a different, well, no, I still benefited from getting the internship I got at Duke, 'cause I learned that I was really more interested in injury prevention than I wasn't in surgery. And at that point I thought I was more interested in, you know, orthopedics from that point of view. And I ended up being more interested in injury prevention. So I can't, I don't wanna take that away. That was important. But I may have been able to take advantage of a little bit more while I was at Duke and maybe in the summer after that than I did because I still really hadn't figured it all out until I would argue till the, you know, senior fall, I definitely think I would've been less stressed and may maybe, maybe I would've sought a little more help at the time, even though it wasn't cool. Or maybe those resources didn't exist, but I would've at least tried because I think I've always been someone that's willing to try, whether you, you know, you know, fail or win. I was willing to try things I just didn't know about some of these things I've now learned about, whether it's through public health or just. Because we're all a little wiser 25, 30 years later.
LJR: Yeah, exactly.
DS: Probably more the latter.
LJR: And I think that's right and you have shown that you've been able to try things and follow where one thing will lead to the next, even if you didn't know that the next even existed, which I think is the hallmark of someone who really is curious and just wants to explore. So I think you've done that in spades and it will be interesting to see where your explorations take you in the future. And we're just really thrilled that you were able to share all this with us so far. So thanks so much for being here.
DS: Well, thank you know, thank you for a chance for telling part of the story and I appreciate your nice comments. Have a good day.
LJR: That was Derek Shendell, professor and concentration leader for Environmental Health Sciences in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health and Justice at the Rutgers School of Public Health. He's also the director of the New Jersey Safe Schools Program there. He's widely published and continues churning out high impact work.
Dare I say, that's just like us with this show. Hopefully you followed us on your favorite podcast app or have bookmarked RoadsTakenshow.com, so you have our full complement of episodes at the ready whenever you need another great story. Thanks so much for your continued support of all my guests and me, Leslie Jennings Rowley, on Roads Taken.