Public Health Epidemiology Conversations

Public Health Epidemiology Conversations, called the PHEC Podcast on air, is an interview show hosted by Dr. Charlotte Hughes-Huntley. Its guiding idea is that public health touches everything. The people who do the work, it follows, have stories worth hearing in full. Interviews move at a measured pace, and the questions often run backward before they run forward: when did the interest start, how did a guest find the field, what did an early turn teach them? The effect is a career told as a narrative rather than a résumé read aloud. The present-day material is where the stakes land. In the Chicago episode, Dr. Olusimbo Ige, speaking as health commissioner, confronts the fact that Black residents are dying 15 years earlier than their neighbors, says public health is in an ideological war, and describes advising the mayor and city council on priorities and where city resources go. Her insistence that such gaps can be solved, paired with the host's instinct to celebrate progress and replicate it, gives that conversation a hopeful edge. Kristie Ellickson, PhD, explains cumulative impact science, which maps pollution, social stressors and health burdens together to reveal which communities carry the heaviest load. That episode ties the science to community leadership and to what defending scientific integrity looks like now. Kumba Sennaar, PhD, recounts how years of freelance writing led to writing about AI for a new research firm that was just starting up, before large language models arrived, and argues for cutting through the hype. Catherine Troisi, PhD, MS, a viral epidemiologist, has given over 600 media interviews in five years and holds that plain language matters more than credentials. The same conversation takes in phone calls to representatives as everyday resistance, why mentoring matters more than ever, and marching on the National Mall. Not every episode is one-on-one. A roundtable brings together three public health professionals to share the stories they use to explain their work to friends and family, and to talk about loneliness and workforce development in behavioral health. Elsewhere the host speaks straight to the audience, recalling a slide-free panel she moderated at the South Carolina Public Health Association's annual meeting that included Catawba Nation and Gullah Geechee Nation representatives. A thread of clear communication runs through it all. The host describes leading an epidemiology consulting firm that helps nonprofits and community health foundations communicate health information in plain language, and several guests come at that same problem from their own angles. She mirrors and affirms far more than she challenges, which leaves guests room to speak at length. For a first listen, the Chicago conversation shows the show at its most hopeful, while the roundtable, titled Public Health Is Everywhere, shows how wide the field runs.