Kiersten Edwards was 8 years previous when her older brother, Daniel McPeck, left residence to hitch the U.S. Marine Corps. And as Edwards grew older, she spent loads of time away from residence competing for the U.S. Snowboard Team.

But whilst they had been separated by 13 years and 1000’s of miles, they remained shut and McPeck all the time had a particular greeting for his sister.

“She knew every time she spoke to her brother, he would say, ‘How’s my beautiful little sister?’” says James Edwards, Kiersten’s father.

But on Christmas day in 2017, when Edwards was a senior in highschool, these candy messages had been silenced perpetually when McPeck died from a fentanyl overdose.

Kiersten Edwards in Florida together with her brothers Daniel (left) and Ryan.

Edwards’ journey since her brother’s demise has not been a straight line. She thought-about changing into a health care provider, enrolled at Syracuse University for engineering, and is now a public well being main who’ll graduate in May. During her time at Syracuse, Edwards found that her need to make the world a greater place could possibly be realized via public well being initiatives resembling habit prevention.

“I’m never going to be able to bring my brother back, but maybe I can positively affect the lives of other people,” Edwards says. “I think that’s what drives me, taking the trauma and pain that I experienced and really trying to protect other people from it.”

As a neighborhood volunteer, an award-winning educating assistant within the Department of Physics and the recipient of a number of Syracuse University Office of Undergraduate Research and Creative Engagement (SOURCE) awards for her public well being analysis, Edwards has already made a major distinction within the lives of others.

A double main in public well being and neuroscience with a public well being focus in habit prevention, Edwards can also be designated as a 2023 Falk Scholar, the very best educational award conferred by the Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics.

And to cap off her distinctive 4 years at Syracuse, Edwards has been named a 2023 Syracuse University Scholar–the very best educational accolade given to graduating seniors–and he or she and her fellow students will lead the coed processional at Commencement.

It appears Daniel McPeck’s lovely little sister is doing simply high-quality.

“I’m extremely proud of what she’s doing, and Daniel would just love it,” James Edwards says. “Daniel loved his family and let them know it every time he saw them. To have her find some good in it and honor him that way, nothing can make me happier.”

‘Exercise Her Mind’

Edwards’ fascination with well being began together with her personal. When she was round 4, she and her father had been four-wheeling on the paths within the woods close to their Vermont residence when a tree department fell and punctured her leg.

Her mother and father rushed her to the physician’s workplace, the place she squirmed on the desk till the physician requested if she wished to sit down and watch him sew her up. “Yeah, I want to watch,” Kiersten Edwards recollects saying, “this is super cool.”

“I was like, uh, I think I need a chair,” James Edwards says, laughing. “I’m all woozy, and she was glued to it.”

Edwards’ tolerance for ache can be examined as she developed into an Olympic-level snowboarder who competed for World Cup groups in a number of junior world championship occasions. Her accidents mounted, and he or she wanted surgical procedure for a torn anterior cruciate ligament in her knee.

Before accidents took their toll, Kiersten Edwards was an Olympic-level snowboarder.

The physician who carried out her surgical procedure was a household pal who was additionally a health care provider for the U.S. Olympic crew. Sensing her curiosity in drugs, he requested if Edwards wished to shadow him for a day. Following a day of watching knee and hip alternative surgical procedures, Edwards determined she wished to be a surgeon.

Edwards rehabbed her knee and ultimately returned to top-level competitors, however her coronary heart was now not in it.

“Snowboarding was fun and a passion, but it wasn’t what she was meant to be,” James Edwards says. “I think she was tired of training and exercising her body and wanted to train and exercise her mind.”

‘I’m Learning from You’

Edwards had her future mapped out: Study biomedical engineering, attend medical college, and change into an orthopedic surgeon. Syracuse University had all the time been on her radar as a result of her sister, Alicia, graduated from Syracuse in 2006 and Edwards’ “first crush” was basketball star Carmelo Anthony, who led the Orange to the nationwide championship in 2003 when Edwards was 3.

“I sobbed when he left Syracuse because it didn’t quite make sense to me why he was leaving,” Edwards says, referring to Anthony’s departure from Syracuse in 2003 for the NBA.

In her freshman yr at Syracuse, Edwards met her accomplice, Andrew Nibbi, and began to query if spending the following eight years changing into a health care provider can be one of the best factor for her private life. While she was nonetheless concerned about well being, she began to consider different profession choices and thought of transferring to a different school.

In the spring of 2020, her freshman yr, Edwards took an introduction to physics class taught by Walter Freeman, an affiliate educating professor within the Department of Physics within the College of Arts and Sciences. That was firstly of the COVID-19 pandemic, and as college students transitioned to on-line studying Freeman created a gaggle chat for the category of greater than 400 college students.

Edwards and Nibbi had been among the many college students who would keep related with Freeman late into the night time to debate their “thoughts and feelings and hopes and dreams and fears” throughout that scary time, Freeman says.

In the autumn, Edwards and Nibbi joined Freeman’s introduction to astronomy class. For their last venture, Edwards wrote a poem that in contrast gravity to the social cohesiveness forces that had been being strained throughout the pandemic. Nibbi wrote stirring music to accompany Edwards’ impassioned studying.

Freeman was floored.

“I returned their project ungraded,” Freeman says. “In these cases, I usually give students extra credit, but I told them I’m not qualified to give you a grade on what you have done here because I’m learning from you and not the other way around.”

Kiersten Edwards and her accomplice, Andrew Nibbi, in California.

As Edwards gravitated towards public well being and Nibbi towards the Newhouse School of Public Communications to pursue a profession in filmmaking, Freeman turned their sounding board. Freeman acknowledged Edwards’ many abilities, and he requested her to hitch his group chat within the spring of 2021 to assist college students with homework. In the autumn, she was employed as a educating assistant for the astronomy and physics lessons that she had taken with Freeman.

In the spring of 2022, Edwards was acknowledged for her means to attach with college students with an Undergraduate Teaching Award from the Department of Physics.

“She has been a cultural leader among other teaching assistants in that she understands what we are about, the supportive environment we’re trying to create, and the human values of our course,” Freeman says. “She has always done what needs to be done to take care of people.”

‘Why Are You All So Happy?’

In August 2020, because the University was about to enter its first full college yr of the COVID-19 pandemic, Edwards was employed to work within the testing lab that was arrange within the Life Sciences Complex. There, she met Falk College Associate Professor of Public Health Brittany Kmush and college students majoring in public well being.

“I was like, what is this public health thing and why are you all so happy?” Edwards says, smiling. “This was before we had a vaccine and everything was shut down, and what struck me was that everyone in that lab who was a public health major seemed just a lot happier than a lot of people I knew.”

Whether they had been within the lab for pay, an internship, or as a service-learning course for public well being, the scholars had been “generally happy and they enjoyed contributing to something that directly affected their lives,” Kmush says.

“We were making the (COVID testing) pools, so once they got the hang of it, it was pretty monotonous and they could talk and chat with each other across the tables and get to know each other and talk about their different degrees,” Kmush says.

Intrigued, Edwards began investigating the foremost and emailed Undergraduate Director and Associate Professor of Public Health Maureen Thompson to ask questions concerning the completely different paths she may take with public well being, together with habit prevention.

Through her conversations with Thompson and her advisor Professor Dessa Bergen-Cico, and in her lessons with public well being professors like Kmush, Associate Professor Ignatius Ijere, and Assistant Professor Miriam Mutambudzi, Edwards got here to determine the social determinants of well being (meals insecurity, racism, training, and so on.) and their devastating affect.

“There’s one particular class that I took with Dr. Mutambudzi that really emphasizes how cultural disparities affect health throughout somebody’s lifetime,” Edwards says. “There are statistics and stories that have really affected me that came from this class and all of my other classes (at Falk) that emphasize to me the importance of looking at racial and gender disparities in health, why are they there, and what can we do to fix them?”

After taking Kmush’s epidemiology course, Edwards requested if she may get entangled in analysis and Kmush prompt SOURCE. With Kmush as her college mentor, Edwards obtained a grant to pursue her thought of finding out Syracuse University’s COVID knowledge and evaluating it to the University’s COVID insurance policies to see if she may determine developments that contributed to extra or fewer circumstances.

Kiersten Edwards was intrigued by the various completely different paths she may take with public well being, together with habit prevention.

What makes Edwards’ analysis distinctive is that she’s utilizing knowledge from the semesters when it was obligatory for all college students to check. That provides her a extra full image of a selected inhabitants than, for instance, a county’s knowledge that may all the time be incomplete as a result of not each resident reported the results of their residence take a look at.

Edwards hopes to finish her evaluation by commencement, and he or she’ll accomplice with one other pupil who’ll work on getting the analysis printed subsequent yr. Kmush says the findings can ultimately be used to make knowledgeable selections about vaccines, masking, and different protocols for COVID, RSV, the flu or no matter else comes alongside.

“I want to feel like I’m making a difference, so that means I want the research I do to support policy changes for the positive,” Edwards says. “Making a change in policy is the way you affect real human lives.”

‘Go Out and Get It’

Following commencement Edwards will return residence to Los Angeles, the place she’ll be part of Nibbi, who’s working as a digital imaging technician within the movie business. Eventually, she needs to pursue a Ph.D. in behavioral neuroscience with an emphasis on learn how to diagnose and deal with habit and substance abuse issues.

But for now, she’s taking a spot yr to work as a analysis assistant at Samuel Merritt University, a personal college targeted on well being sciences that has campuses in Los Angeles and Oakland. Her analysis, which has already began, will give attention to burnout and the way it impacts the workforce with an emphasis on nurses, girls, and underrepresented populations.

“I want to figure out a way to use the research I’m going to be doing on the neuroscience side of things in public health and then, moving forward, how can we practically apply this to the lives of humans?” Edwards says.

Those near Edwards have little doubt she goes to make a distinction and save lives.

“She really embodies the virtue of the well-rounded academic, of being a scholar of not just this thing or that thing, but many things, and putting all of those talents to use to try to make the world more than what it should be,” says Freeman, her mentor.

“Her future is all laid out for her,” says her father, James Edwards, “and she’s going to go out and get it.”

For her public well being internship this spring, Edwards is working in Syracuse for the needle change program at ACR Health, a not-for-profit that gives quite a lot of assist providers. For Valentine’s Day, the shoppers–these with drug points who’re exchanging needles at ACR–had been invited to write down nameless notes to the workers.

One observe will stay perpetually etched in Edwards’ reminiscence and it may have simply come from her brother Daniel throughout his most troublesome struggles. It learn, “Thank you for still realizing we’re people.”

“I think there are a lot of people who are forgotten,” Edwards says. “So much of what I want to do is trying to highlight and remember those people.”