Rachel Hollander started her medical school clinical rotations at MSU College of Human Medicine’s Flint campus in 2019. It was a hard time for a city that had already seen its share of hard times.

This was just a few years after a state of emergency was declared over lead levels in the drinking water. Then came COVID-19. The metro Detroit native found herself volunteering at drive-up vaccine clinics at high school and church parking lots across Flint.

“It was definitely an interesting intersection as a medical student, seeing the level of justified mistrust because of the water crisis and decades of racial redlining and really racist policies, and then seeing COVID on top of it,” she said.

Instead of being driven away by those challenges, Hollander was inspired. She saw the community’s resilience — and the difference that a courageous public health response can make. When she moved on to a pediatric residency in Washington, D.C., she undertook a special education track focusing on leadership in advocacy, under-resourced communities and health equity.

Now her career has brought her back to Flint, where she is diving deeper into her passions for pediatrics and public health as the Alice Hamilton Scholar for 2025-27.

The scholar program is provided through the Pediatric Public Health Initiative, a partnership of MSU and Hurley Children’s Hospital. It is named for Alice Hamilton (1869–1970), a physician and social justice pioneer considered the mother of occupational health. Scholars earn an MSU Master of Public Health degree while engaging in partnerships in clinical care, research and public policy.

What does that look like for Hollander, as just the third Alice Hamilton Scholar?

“I get to do a lot of really cool things and I love it,” she said.

“One, I’m a pediatrician, that’s first and foremost. I care for the children of Flint,” Hollander said. “I also am an educator. I teach the residents and the medical students how to be pediatricians, or future doctors in general, within the context of caring for kids while understanding the community.”

• The MSU Master of Public Health program, part of the Charles Stewart Mott Department of Public Health, has developed an innovative, community-focused model that is influencing local, regional and national policy. Participants choose from three MPH concentrations: public health data management and analytics, rural public health, and generalist, which is customizable to the interest of the student.

Hollander chose the generalist concentration so she could focus on a broad range of topics.

“I am passionate about teaching medical students about public health-related topics, and I wanted to ensure I have a strong general knowledge base,” she said.

Her research and advocacy responsibilities include working with the Pediatric Public Health Initiative to investigate and promote how Rx Kids, the nation’s first community-wide prenatal and infant cash prescription program, improves health outcomes.

Since it began in Flint in 2024, Rx Kids has expanded to 42 Michigan communities, and it recently received high-profile validation of its effectiveness. A study published in The Lancet Public Health found that Rx Kids led to significant improvements in birth outcomes for infants born in Flint. Additional published research has shown improvements in financial stability and maternal mental health, healthcare utilization and child welfare involvement.

“It feels really amazing being a part of something that is showing true impact on children and families and the medical community,” Hollander said. “Getting to do the backend research while also being able to directly offer it to my patients has been really powerful.”

Rx Kids was launched and is led by Dr. Mona Hanna, pediatrician and associate dean of public health at the College of Human Medicine, who also gained renown for raising the alarm about elevated lead levels in the blood of Flint’s children and pointing to the city’s water as the cause.

During her time as a medical student in Flint, Hollander met Hanna a few times. Now she reports directly to her through the scholar program.

“It’s pretty amazing to be in the room with someone who just has a glow and a buzz around her all the time,” Hollander said. “So I strive to do things and come up with ideas as brave and as big as hers. Having her as a guide and mentor has given me a lot more confidence.”

In addition to her faculty roles, Hollander enjoys resuming her work with the Spartan Street Medicine program, which she helped launch as a student. The program sends teams of supervised students into the field to care for people who are experiencing homelessness.

“I love medical students,” she said. “Even though med school is really, really hard, they still want to do more and more, specifically students who come to Flint and want to help the community.”

Hollander’s own enthusiasm for making a difference for the families of Flint has only grown since her time as a medical student. Becoming a new mom herself has helped her to empathize with the difficult work of being a parent. Her public health perspective provides insight into the additional challenges that Flint families face.

“When you're focused on having stable housing, having stable food access, you’re not worried about the exercise recommendations I’m giving or going to that extra lab draw,” Hollander said.

That’s why she is so passionate about promoting and advocating for improvements in policies and practices to improve public health.

“We need to recognize that there are so many different structures that go into health. That could be our environments, that could be our culture, the food, the roads that we drive on, the sidewalks that are there to help us be able to cross the street safely, the vaccines that we have access to,” she said.

“All of that creates or takes away health, and all of that is sustained by public health endeavors. We can’t have health without the backbone of public health.”

This story originally appeared on the College of Human Medicine website.