Episode #467 Three Fields, One Mission
- 6 hours ago
- 4 min read
On This Episode Of The Public Health Epidemiology Conversations (PHEC) Podcast
What Does Public Health Actually Look Like?
Public health rarely looks the way people expect. It shows up in a hospital pharmacy trying to help a patient afford insulin. It shows up on a highway where a transportation safety lead is tracking who gets left out of the data. It shows up in a Nigerian medical school, where a young physician starts asking bigger questions about mental health policy.
In this episode, Dr. Huntley brings together three professionals with three very different lenses for one conversation about a shared mission.
A Physician Who Sees Beyond the Clinic
Dr. Odafen trained as a physician in Nigeria before pursuing graduate work at Johns Hopkins in public mental health and bioethics. She shares how her clinical training opened her eyes to the limits of what happens inside a hospital's walls, and how that realization has shaped her ongoing work in mental health advocacy.
Bringing Public Health to the Road
Angie Byrne spent eighteen years at the US Department of Transportation before moving into transportation safety leadership. She describes herself as a public health professional who has found her home in an unexpected industry, and she makes the case for why safety on the roads has always been a public health issue.
The Pharmacist Connecting the Dots
Brian Wenger leads medication reconciliation work at Brown University Health, where he sees firsthand how insurance gaps, affordability, and access shape patient outcomes. His perspective bridges pharmacy and public health in ways that reveal just how connected these systems really are.
Why This Conversation Matters
Together, these three guests unpack what it means to explain public health in plain language to the people closest to them. They talk about proactive thinking, the power of relationships across disciplines, and why storytelling turns abstract data into something people can actually feel. This is a conversation for anyone who has ever struggled to explain what they do, or why it matters.
About Our Guests
Brian Wenger
Brian Wenger is a clinical pharmacist with Brown University Health in Providence, Rhode Island. He leads a service focused on medication reconciliation and transitions of care, identifying discrepancies related to safety, accessibility, and affordability at the point of hospital discharge. His work sits at the intersection of pharmacy, population health, and public health, and he is an active member of the Rhode Island Public Health Association.
Angie Byrne
Angie Byrne is the safety practice lead at Toole Design. Before joining the company, she spent eighteen years at the US Department of Transportation, where she worked across behavioral traffic safety, rail and transit, large trucks and buses, and closely with law enforcement and emergency responders. She brings a public health lens to transportation safety, applying systems thinking to a field that has traditionally operated in silos.
Dr. Salome Odafen
Dr. Salome Odafen is a physician researcher who began her career in medical school in her home country of Nigeria. She went on to complete graduate studies at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, earning degrees in public mental health and bioethics. Her work is driven by a passion for reshaping the conversation around mental health in Nigeria and across Africa, and she continues to balance her research with a deep commitment to direct patient care.
Listen To This Episode Of The Public Health Epidemiology Conversations (PHEC) Podcast
Conversation Highlights
Public health starts with people, not just policy.Â
Dr. Odafen frames public health as fundamentally about human connection, describing it as a collective responsibility to care for one another beyond individual clinical encounters.
Proactive thinking changes outcomes.Â
Angie explains that public health works to get ahead of problems rather than waiting to react, a mindset shift that applies far beyond traditional health settings.
Systems level change requires more than a single fix.Â
Angie points to safe systems thinking in transportation safety, emphasizing that lasting change depends on building redundancy and resilience rather than relying on one solution.
Relationships across disciplines are essential.Â
All three guests agree that public health work depends on building trust and communication with professionals outside their own fields, from engineers to case managers.
Root causes are often systemic.
 Brian describes tracing patient level challenges, like affording a critical medication, back through several steps to policy and systemic barriers, illustrating how public health thinking reframes everyday problems.
Storytelling makes data meaningful.Â
Dr. Odafen and Dr. Huntley discuss how humanizing statistics through real stories helps people, including legislators, connect emotionally with the impact of public health work.
Public health belongs in every industry.Â
Whether in medicine, transportation, or pharmacy, the guests agree that public health thinking can and should show up anywhere systems affect people's lives.
"I think of public health almost as like a big massive quality improvement project that we all need to just tackle together in bits and chunks." — Brian Wenger
"I've described myself as a public health person who's infiltrated the transportation space." — Angie Byrne
"Your burden is my burden. Your worries are my worries." — Dr. Salome Odafen
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Public Health Consulting
DrCHHuntley LLC is a public health consulting firm that specializes in epidemiology consulting, supporting large nonprofit organizations in South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, and Florida that serve Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). We also provide nationwide public health consulting and epidemiology consulting support to BIPOC organizations across the United States.