Elizabeth Orlandini ’19

Elizabeth Orlandini ’19 is a public health specialist at the Rockland County Health Department.

Orlandini earned an MPH in Community Health and Social Sciences at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy. She worked as a Curatorial Assistant at the Neuberger Museum of Art.

Elizabeth’s Purchase Experience in Her Own Words

Anthropology endows scholars with the ability to situate individual human experience within a larger ecology of social, political, and environmental forces in which a person is situated, regardless of individual academic interest.

My time in the anthro department oriented me toward recognizing the complex and multilayered landscape that we as individuals traverse, and gave me the tools to conduct community-led, culturally-appropriate scholarly and interpersonal research.

My desire to direct these skills toward a more STEM-heavy field and incorporate them into a mixed-methods mode of research led me to a Master of Public Health at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, with a focus in Community Health and Social Sciences in 2021. My research interests are housing justice, food insecurity, and the opioid epidemic; and I work under harm reduction and community organizing frameworks in my academics.

In public health, the large network of sociopolitical and environmental forces is referred to as the social determinants of health. It is the foundational concept that underpins a majority of public health research and development, and the current generation of public health practitioners, seeking to build upon the shortcoming failures of our predecessors, is guided by a renewed focus on holistically improving health and well-being by targeting upstream political, economic, and social preconditions for poor health and community-wide disparities.

Many health inequities among populations are rooted in structural oppression that communities of differing race, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic status experience on a daily basis.

By applying research strategies borrowed from anthropology—participant observation/participatory action research, ethnography, and autoethnography—to address these disparities, we are better able to identify a range of causes for a given disparity, and effectively access and center the affected population to design a highly-effective and sensitive range of interventions.