A Duke Kunshan University student has set her sights on joining the fight against global health inequalities after being accepted onto a leading master’s program.
The Class of 2022’s Tingxi (Tina) Long, who has already published two peer-reviewed papers as first author, will study biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University as she continues to pursue an interest in health that she developed in middle school.
“Studying global health allows me to see the health inequity and inaccessibility of medical resources in different parts of the world,” the global health (biology track) major said.
“Global health aims to provide equal healthcare and improves the health of humans and I want to be a part of the effort.
“I’m most interested in discovering the genetic and environmental factors that influence the health of a person.”
In 2020, she joined a research team led by Chenkai Wu, assistant professor of global health at DKU, and was the first author of two papers published in the journals JAMA Network Open and Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience.
One of the papers reported that diet quality was decreasing among older adults in the United States despite improving levels of education and income.
In the second, she was part of a team that conducted the first study of the link between alcohol-induced “Asian flush” and cognitive impairment among the eldest members of the Chinese population.
Wu said Long was an impressive student, a quick learner with high levels of self-motivation and perseverance.
“Tina has first-authored two peer-reviewed papers. This is quite rare even for a master’s-level student,” he said.
Long, who is from Sichuan province, chose to study at Johns Hopkins after receiving 10 offers for postgraduate study at some of the top public health graduate programs in the U.S.. She was accepted to Johns Hopkins within hours of her interview in January.
“I didn’t expect it to come so fast because I hadn’t finished all my applications by that time,” she said.
“But it was a great relief because I almost didn’t feel any anxiety waiting for the decisions.”
As a member of Duke Kunshan’s Class of 2022, Long was among the very first students to graduate from the university’s four-year bachelor’s degree program.
She described DKU as “like a utopia” for her, allowing her to build close relationships with professors, meet people from across the world and “fight for the same goal, to make ourselves better global citizens.”
