Scholar-Elect Elijah Darden talks about his plans to improve public health through an interdisciplinary approach that is tailored to the needs of particular groups.
Homogenised programmes mean well, but they don’t necessarily do well. There is a wide range of impacts and interventions we need to be aware of. We need to make sure that we both mean and do well.
Elijah Darden
Elijah Darden was brought up with a strong sense of health inequalities and an awareness that multiple approaches affect wellbeing. Through his MPhil in Population Health Sciences, he is keen to bring an interdisciplinary, community-based focus to public health that is tailored to the needs of particular groups.
“A lot of public health done on the national scale can have very homogenous administration conveying fragmented information.. You have to know where to look to get the support you need,” he says. “I want to bridge those gaps, using demographic data on things like the job people do or where they grew up that allows us to tailor information to individuals. Homogenised programmes mean well, but they don’t necessarily do well. There is a wide range of impacts and interventions we need to be aware of. We need to make sure that we both mean and do well.”
Childhood
Elijah was born in Madison, Wisconsin, but spent most of his childhood in Naperville, a suburb of Chicago, in Illinois. Both his parents are professors. His dad, who was a police officer, teaches criminal justice and his mother teaches juvenile criminal justice at a community college. Both came from impoverished backgrounds – his father from Chicago and his mother from rural Wisconsin – and had experienced health inequalities first hand. That experience and Elijah’s experience with a genetic cancer syndrome had a big influence on him. Both he and his older sister have pursued medicine as a career, she as a medical resident while Elijah is more interested in preventive and public health.
At elementary school Elijah became an avid reader, encouraged by a very good library at his school. He also started playing classical piano and later played the trombone and other wind instruments. Elijah was in a whole range of bands all through school and college, including jazz bands, wind ensembles and orchestras. He started to compose, starting with quartets and he now writes for symphony orchestras and wind and jazz ensembles. “Music has been a significant part of my life,” he says. “It has always been my way of connecting to people and community.”
Elijah did a music minor at university and a major in psychological and brain sciences at Washington University in St Louis, where he was an Annika Rodriguez Scholar, a scholarship that emphasises leadership and academic excellence. He wanted to bring the two subjects together as he saw the relevance of music to health. Elijah is very much in favour of an interdisciplinary approach to health issues and took classes in everything from neuroscience, psychology and maths to anthropology. “I tried to gain a wide breadth of knowledge in different fields as they all have something to contribute and having people from diverse perspectives provides a good melting pot for inspiration.”
Emergency health
In the summer before he started at Washington University, Elijah took classes at a local community college to get his licence as an Emergency Medical Technician [EMT] and the summer after his first year he worked full time as an EMT for Ridge Ambulance Service, an EMS agency that services the Chicagoland area. When he started at university he joined the Emergency Support Team and was involved with it for all four years of his undergraduate degree. At the time the university was just transitioning out of some pandemic measures and moving back to the classroom. Covid precautions such as mask wearing were still in place. Elijah helped with flu and Covid vaccinations in 2022, both getting people to come for their vaccinations and administering the jabs, ensuring everyone on campus had access.
He also joined the Education Committee of the Emergency Support Team as a result of having been CEO of My Book Wish prior to starting at university, an education NGO which redistributed books to poorer communities and schools. It showed him the links between education and health.
CPR
On the committee, he led the university’s CPR programme. He gave classes in how to do CPR and became more and more involved in the programme. He was promoted to assistant field director of public health, the first person to hold the role, and then to President of the Emergency Support Team. Before the organisation had been more focused on patient care and Elijah was committed to giving it a stronger community health focus.
One of his big goals was to offer CPR classes to the community at a more affordable rate. Some private organisations were charging as much as $80 to get CPR certification. Elijah managed to reduce that to $10. He says his studies in psychology informed how he approached the issue of health inequalities and he became involved in a new project to address the higher mortality rate for women suffering from heart failure shortly after taking a course in prejudice and discrimination. That project, LifeSaveHer, was run by Abigail Schipper who will be in Elijah’s Gates Cambridge cohort. He met her at a national collegiate EMS conference and agreed to trial her female CPR mannequins in Washington.
Previously CPR had been taught on male mannequins due, in part, to cultural sensitivities about practising CPR on women, and it was thought this might be a contributory factor to the gender disparity in survival rates. “The difference in survival rates was stark and it shows how negative outcomes could come from seemingly good intentions,” says Elijah.
His and others’ work on expanding the CPR, research and public health initiatives in the Emergency Support Team [EST] led to his university being named a National HeartSafe University Campus in 2024 and EST earning the group merit award from the Missouri Public Health Association in 2024 for its significant contributions to the public health of Missouri.
Elijah finished his undergraduate degree in May and has been coaching fellow students for medical school admissions and planning his PhD framework.
He chose to apply to the University of Cambridge as he wanted to get an international perspective on public health as well as to look at it from a diverse range of fields. For his MPhil, which he begins in the autumn, he is keen to create a framework that brings together a range of different fields to address health equity and tailor interventions in medical and community health education to different communities.
