August 14, 2024
Tacona Hlatshwako
Grade 22 student Takhona Hlatshwako never wavered in her determination to use her knowledge of public health to help her home country of Eswatini, a Southern African nation devastated by HIV, but as the health situation in her home country (formerly known as Swaziland) changed, so did her focus.
“I ended up not taking any of the classes I said I would take if I got the Rhodes Scholarship,” said Hlatszwako, who earned a bachelor's degree in health policy and management from the Gillings School of Global Health and used the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship to earn two advanced degrees from Oxford University in England, one focused on global epidemiology studies and the other on social health policy.
“I went into public health because I saw my community hit by communicable diseases, but now what we're seeing is a rise in non-communicable diseases,” she said. To address these diseases, like cancer, heart disease and diabetes, countries need strong health systems and other resources. At the same time, low-income countries battling infectious diseases like HIV and COVID-19 face the toughest challenges.
“How do we address the double burden of communicable and non-communicable diseases? That's really what's on my mind right now,” Hlatszwako says. “I hope that through my doctoral program I'll have the opportunity to explore that further.”
That led Hlatszwako to return to Gillings College, where she studied public health as an undergraduate.
Chance Encounters and Learning
Tacona Hlatshwako
So how did someone who grew up more than 8,000 miles from Chapel Hill end up in the Carolinas? “I think it was a stroke of luck. Things just fell into place,” Hlatszwako says.
Her journey began in another country, Armenia, where Hlatshvako received a full scholarship to spend her final two years of high school at United World College Dilijan to earn her International Baccalaureate diploma.
When Hlatszwako told her college admissions adviser that she wanted to study public health but needed to get a full scholarship, the adviser told her about the Morehead-Cain Scholarship, a full scholarship at Carolina modeled after Oxford's Rhodes Scholarship, and later recommended Hlatszwako for the scholarship.
“I say it was a stroke of luck because Carolina has one of the best schools of public health in the world,” Hlatszwako says. “Those two things came together so beautifully that I knew in my heart that this was the place for me to go.”
Home Again
Hlatszwako hasn't been back to Carolina, or even the United States, since receiving her Rhodes Award, but she'll be back in a few days and it'll feel like home. “A PhD is a big commitment; it's a five-year project,” she says. “So it really made sense for me to come back to a place where there's a sense of community and where I have professors and mentors who have supported me along the way.”
Professionally, she values Carolina's “rich research environment.” As an undergraduate, she collaborated with the Carolina Population Center and the Global Health and Infectious Diseases Institute at Gillings. “There was a buzz around research,” she recalled in a Zoom interview from Eswatini. “There were always opportunities to jump in as a research assistant, and a lot of the professors were working on a lot of interesting research.”
On a personal note, she also hopes to spend time with friends, especially her best friend who is in her second year at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. “I'm also looking forward to meeting the Morehead-Cain family,” she says. “Even though I'm no longer an undergrad, I'll hopefully be able to get free coffee in their kitchen.”
Read the original article from UNC News.
Please contact the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health communications team at [email protected].
