A team of graduate students at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, won a "Bears Breaking Boundaries" award in the category of "Neglected Diseases." Rather than honing in on one risk factor, area or affliction, the students opted to focus their prize-winning multidisciplinary project on understanding the pathways to health as a means of addressing a host of diseases.

The team received one of two $7,500 awards from the contest, which was developed as a collaborative effort between the Big Ideas @ Berkeley initiative and the Berkeley student government (ASUC).

First-year epidemiology and biostatistics MPH students Ms. Karina Arambula, Ms. Jessica Frasure, Ms. Susan Gruber, Ms. Maya Mascarenhas and Ms. Ann Weber, along with recent MPH graduate Ms. Nancy Fleischer, conceived the project in a seminar led by Dr. Constance Wang.

"We believe that tapping into people's latent knowledge about their own pathways to health may provide valuable information for developing successful strategies for remaining healthy and overcoming obstacles to health.," said Ms. Gruber.

The students credit Dr. Wang with helping mentor the project, and cite Dr. S. Leonard Syme as a source of inspiration. The students will use the prize money to bring the project to fruition over the summer, and have already submitted their paper to the journal Emerging Themes in Epidemiology.