Vanderbilt Alumna Makes Strides in Public Health

Vanderbilt University Posse alumna Elizabeth Linton is a clinical research coordinator in the department of emergency medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. With plans to become a chronic disease epidemiologist to advance public health research, she is also pursuing a master’s of public health at Columbia University.

“I want to contribute to finding answers to the key questions in public health,” says Elizabeth.

At Mount Sinai, Elizabeth recruits patients for a study of post-emergency outcomes among geriatric patients, manages the research database, and audits consent logs according to Institutional Review Board policies.

“I feel like I am collecting people’s stories,” she says. “There’s always a conversation that emerges around people’s health and their hopes for the future.”

In 2014, Elizabeth graduated magna cum laude from Vanderbilt with a bachelor’s degree in medicine, health and society (MHS). She worked as an undergraduate research assistant in the department of biomedical informatics, collaborating with faculty, staff and clinicians to conduct qualitative research to build forms for the hospital’s medical record system. Her work was presented at the American Medical Informatics Association Annual Conference.

In addition, Elizabeth served on the student advisory committee of MHS, helping to create an internship/job database for students. This tool became a platform for student access to career opportunities beyond traditional research offered by the university and incorporated direct networks from individuals, professors and recruiters.

“I hope that if I have the opportunity to mentor the next generation of epidemiologists, I can be like my Posse mentors, Dr. Tina Smith and Dr. Rosevelt Noble,” says Elizabeth. “I admire them and my Vanderbilt experience would not have been the same without them.”