Outstanding Scholar Advocates

Harkirat Kaur, 2026

With her social justice focused voice, Harkirat aims to improve youth-centered health communication strategies.  She engaged with her community partner to lead the development of a youth-centered board. She advocated to extend the life of the youth-focused board so that the organization can better meet the health focused needs of this population. She is focused on using the program skills, learned while earning her degree, to advocate for the voices of youth who may be disempowered by age, immigrant status, class, race, or gender.

Furthermore, Kaur wrote a personal essay about losing her friend to suicide. Her article, “Building a Resilient Future: Youth Mental Health and Suicide Prevention,” was published by the National Alliance on Mental Illness and was in the UWB news for her work using storytelling to make change.

LaNiqua Bell, 2026

LaNiqua is committed to advancing research and deepening our understanding of community health and social justice. This commitment will undoubtedly have a lasting impact on the field.

LaNiqua deployed frameworks of structural racism and acknowledged the myriad ways in which health care systems harm and do not serve African-American populations effectively, including in the production of health literacy. In order to shift the systemic lack of African-American health care providers, she has innovatively partnered with the BIPOC health care ecosystem to capitalize on existing school and family relationships to bolster pathways to health care careers.

As a result of her work, she innovatively created a new family-based intervention that recognizes the importance of family ties in supporting and assisting students in pursuing these pathways. Her upstream emphasis to produce structural transformation in the production of African-American health care providers embodies our program goals and objectives and our School and community vision.

Jacqueline Richards, 2025

With a natural curiosity and drive for learning that is truly exceptional, Jacqueline’s research is helping to inform policy and to shape new paradigms of public health praxis by laying groundwork for new community-driven innovations.

Additionally, she has contributed greatly to the UWB community, supporting her peers as it relates to their own development as scholars, and demonstrating her ability to work with a wide range of individuals while working toward a common goal.

Pia Sampaga-Khim, 2025

Pia is known to be a true advocate for health and social justice. Not only has she been involved at the grassroots level in helping to provide education around critical issues facing the communities she served, but she’s also encouraged and supported those she works with to engage more civically, even providing training at the county level for how to engage in Legislative Education Day in Olympia and helping some of the health educators she supervisors to prepare and to present posters at WA State Public Health Association’s Annual Conference, SOPHE, and APHA.