How Can We Improve Public Health in America?
In her new book, Boston University researcher Monica Wang shares a vision for improving public health in America. Photo by Megan Jones
How Can We Improve Public Health in America?
Boston University researcher Monica Wang’s debut book, The Collective Cure, outlines how we can all contribute to healthier communities; plus, she shares how her childhood shaped her research
La Danza Huitzilmeztli is a sacred celebration of women. For four days and nights, the Indigenous moon dance brings women together to honor each other and nature: some dance, others tend to the ceremonial fire, some care for children or the sick. Everyone has a role to play.
When Boston University researcher Monica Wang attended the ritual in Texas as she was finishing her first book—a vision for improving public health in America—she was assigned to the kitchen, preparing and cooking meals for the around 60 attendees.
“Everybody came together in shared responsibility for celebrating life, nature, and women—and that was incredibly transformative,” says Wang, a BU School of Public Health associate professor of community health sciences.
In her book, The Collective Cure: Upstream Solutions for Better Public Health (Beacon Press, 2026), Wang argues that enhancing our shared well-being requires a collaborative approach that recognizes our interdependence and the roles we can all play in improving the health of our communities. Her past and present research has covered a range of public health topics, including discrimination, misinformation, food access, job flexibility, mental health, and childhood obesity.
The Brink spoke with Wang, who also directs SPH’s Health Communication and Promotion certificate program, about The Collective Cure’s prescription for improving public health in America and why she decided to share the story of her own childhood as a busing student.
Q&A
With Monica Wang
The Brink: The book is called The Collective Cure: Upstream Solutions for Better Public Health. What do you mean by upstream solutions?
Wang: Public health is by definition shared. Many of our biggest health challenges—like diabetes, cancer, infectious diseases—can’t be solved one person at a time. We’ve built a system that’s really good downstream, so treating illness or injury after it’s occurred, but far less effective upstream, where good health actually begins. Midstream is around behaviors and communities: how much we eat, what we eat, how much we move, and whether we get screenings. And then upstream is how those behaviors are shaped in the first place: policies, the neighborhoods we live in, access to clean air and water, livable wages, access to clinics and affordable, fresh produce.
In the United States, we spend a lot of resources downstream, some attention midstream—telling people to eat better, to see their doctor—but what happens when they don’t have access to affordable grocery stores, or there’s a months-long waitlist to see a doctor? We’ve focused the least amount of time and resources upstream in terms of designing neighborhoods and communities to make those choices realistic.
The Brink: In the book, you say anyone—especially nonexperts—can make our public health system better. How?
Wang: One of the misconceptions is that you need a degree in public health or have public or health in your job title in order to be doing part of that work. Think about how interconnected all of our systems are. For example, transportation’s related to health. Our food systems and the way we harvest our agriculture—that’s related to health. Travel and the economy is related to health. The way we design jobs and our work environment is related to health.
What I hope people see through the stories and the science [in the book] is that you can be an ally to public health, because it’s inherently a team sport. You can improve the health of people around you by being a thoughtful neighbor, by being a caring manager or a community advocate. I believe that public health is something that we can build together.
You can improve the health of people around you by being a thoughtful neighbor, by being a caring manager or a community advocate. I believe that public health is something that we can build together.
The Brink: You pick three women—a first-generation Latina student, semiretired Black community organizer, and Indigenous clinical social worker—to talk about how our health is shaped in different ways. Why did you choose that approach?
The goal was really to showcase that even though everybody’s life is distinct, there are common shared themes that come through.
One of the women I feature is Marielis, a first-generation Latina student, proud alumna of Boston University. She grew up in Section 8 housing in the Bronx, and through her story, we really see how economic barriers and the power of social connections can impact health. And then we go to rural Alabama and meet Dorothy, a semiretired African American woman who owns the town’s only general store. There’s no broadband, there are no health clinics. She worked tirelessly during the pandemic to advocate for her community to get mobile vaccines. We see her grassroots efforts and her role as a trusted community messenger made a difference. It also spotlights the major disparities and the lack of resources that rural communities in America face.
And then lastly, in Austin, Texas, we meet Rosa Tupina. She’s an Indigenous clinical social worker, and she works to preserve cultural traditions and knowledge in her community as a form of healing and care. And through her story, readers will see that health isn’t just physical, it’s also spiritual and cultural.
While their lives may look very different on the surface, together their stories reveal a similar shared truth, which is that health isn’t simply a matter of our genetics or our personal choices, it’s really being shaped by neighborhood conditions, economic opportunities, and by larger systems.
The Brink: Your publisher says the book “brings a personal lens” to public health issues, including your childhood as a busing student. Was it a difficult decision to include your own story?
There were parts of my story that I really wanted to tell. From elementary through high school, I lived in Boston, but I bused to Belmont [one of the wealthiest towns in Massachusetts]. And that experience was quite formative in showing me how disparate communities can be economically, environmentally, racially, and health-wise. That was a key part of why I do the research that I do today.
I also share my story about being a working mother. As I was doing research on how job stress impacts health—and how it might impact men and women differently, depending on the roles and resources they may have—it became much more tangible when I was going through it. I share with readers my experience about working and then going through parenthood, and especially how the existing gaps in our system were laid bare when COVID hit.
The Brink: Has writing the book influenced your future research priorities?
I’ve been doing more work in health communication and health misinformation. In writing the book, I worked with a writing coach to develop my skills in narrative nonfiction. What I really want to do next is to continue the bridging of science and storytelling. I’ve spent much of my training, like many other academics, focusing on how to conduct rigorous research, how to write for peer-reviewed journals, and much less on how to communicate the results to different audiences in a way that lands. It’s not that stories replace the research, but rather when you’re able to communicate the research in a way that gives the data a voice, and people can humanize it, they recognize themselves in it.
