Global Health Profiles

Catherine Armbruster, MPH

Among her many accomplishments, Catherine Armbruster was only 20 when she earned her MPH degree in global health from the Rollins School of Public Health. Her interest in public health began while interning with a physician practicing in a small town while she was in college. She was saddened by one of his patients, who was suffering from serious complications associated with unmanaged diabetes. Struck by how this patient's complications could have been prevented with community and preventive health efforts, Armbruster began to consider how she could combine her interest in biology (her college major) with a career in public health.

After graduating at age 18 from Mary Baldwin College's Program for Exceptionally Gifted Students, Armbruster joined the Rollins School of Public Health's Hubert Department of Global Health with the intention of focusing her research while at Rollins on infectious diseases. She accomplished this through her coursework and through her role as a graduate research assistant at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). However, after talking with Dr. Venkat Narayan, the Ruth and O.C. Hubert Professor of Global Health, about India facing the seemingly contradictory dual problems of obesity and malnutrition, Armbruster decided to shift gears for her field and thesis work.

On a Global Field Experience (GFE) scholarship, Armbruster spent the summer of 2008 in Chennai, India, where she designed a research study on risk factors related to migration and diabetes at the Madras Diabetes Research Foundation (MDRF). She also worked with MDRF's Project ORANGE, a study of 25,000 school children in Chennai that aims to clinically detect undiagnosed diabetes and positively influence the nutrition and eating behavior of these children and their families (approximately 100,000 people) through education.

Armbruster took this photo of a young man who had come to Chennai with the hopes of finding work due to the city's economic boom. She says she saw many young men coming to Chennai from the countryside searching for jobs during her brief stay in Chennai.

After working with her for the summer, Dr. Narayan came away just as impressed with Armbruster as she is with him. "Catherine was an outstanding and motivated student, and is someone who will go far," he says.

In addition to working on these two research projects, Armbruster merged her passion as an amateur filmmaker with her newfound interest in chronic diseases in the developing world. While in Chennai and with a video camera provided by the Emory Global Health Institute, she filmed 10 hours of video, which she then edited to a 10-minute documentary film focusing on the diabetes epidemic in India. She made INDIAbetes to communicate on a global level the struggles India is facing with the growing prevalence of diabetes among its population and the risk factors that contribute to it.

INDIAbetes has been played in a New Delhi hospital, and she and her production partner, Brian Danin of BZD Productions, have been in discussions with Georgia Public Radio Broadcasting to air the film. She would like to expand the film to examine other issues such as the role assimilation plays on Indian immigrants and their health outcomes in the U.S.

"In developing an interest in diabetes and producing a video about the broad socio-political, economic, and cultural influences on health in India, she challenges conventional paradigms about chronic diseases as 'diseases of affluence' and makes it easy for audiences to relate to the content and its significance," says Mohammed K. Ali, an assistant professor in the Hubert Department of Global Health, who works closely with Dr. Narayan.

How does she do it all? "It's a constant struggle for me to figure out how to merge my interests," she says. INDIAbetes was the perfect medium for such a merger.

Armbruster will continue to combine her interests and talents in infectious diseases, chronic diseases, and filmmaking now that she has earned her MPH. She has taken a job as a Guest Researcher at the CDC working on infectious diseases, and she will continue to work with Dr. Narayan. She will also focus time on raising the additional $50,000 she needs to expand INDIAbetes. In her spare time, she plans to apply for medical school at the Emory University School of Medicine with the hopes of matriculating in fall 2010.

Armbruster took this photograph while in India and submitted it to the Institute's 2008 Global Health Student Photography Contest.