3rd Annual Health “Comm”petition Promotes Public Health Awareness.
Scarlett Shiloh (left), winner of the 2025 Health “Comm”petition Best Overall award poses with their certificate next to Ziming Xuan, professor of community health sciences.
3rd Annual Health “Comm”petition Promotes Public Health Awareness
Five students earned awards for their standout photo, video, and infographic entries promoting health.
Five Boston University Medical Campus students have been named winners of the 2025 Health “Comm”petition, an annual event led by students at the School of Public Health to promote health education and awareness.
Founded by Ziming Xuan, professor of community health sciences, the contest invites students from SPH, the Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine (CAMED), and the Henry M. Goldman School of Dental Medicine (SDM) to create health communications materials that address a public health challenge of their choice or cover a topic aligning with the theme of National Public Health Week (NPHW). The 2025 theme, “It Starts Here,” celebrates the 30th anniversary of NPHW by honoring the major public health accomplishments of the past three decades and emphasizing the importance of grassroots public health advocacy.
Students could submit three forms of entries: infographics, photos, and videos. A committee of SPH students then evaluated the submissions to determine the winners of five awards: Best Infographic, Best Photo, Best Video, Best Overall, and “Comm”unity Choice.
Dejah Fleurancois and Elijah Winfield, MPH students studying health policy and law and community assessment, program design, implementation, and evaluation respectively, won Best Infographic for their poster on bullying prevention. The poster describes the scope of the problem, its effects, and a variety of strategies to protect high school students.
Rhea Dcunha, an MPH student studying epidemiology and biostatistics, won Best Photo for a shot of rural school children in India lined up to receive a dental screening from a volunteer.
Dcunha also won the “Comm”unity Choice award for a poster on how oral health affects the mind and body. The poster details how dementia and Alzheimer’s, respiratory disease, heart disease, cancer, and other health outcomes are linked to oral hygiene and offers a few tips for maintaining good health, including brushing, flossing, avoiding sugar, and visiting the dentist.
View “Sweet Tooth” on YouTube here.
Fatemah Abdulla, an SDM student, won Best Video for a submission titled “Sweet Tooth,” in which a dentist, played by Abdulla, explains what a cavity is to a young patient, played by Abdulla’s son. The video evokes the infamous Magic School episode where Ms. Frizzle and her students shrink to microscopic size for an educational journey through the human body. An animated version of Abdulla’s son explores his own mouth as he chews on a gummy bear and drinks some juice to learn how sugary foods can fuel the growth of bacteria that breakdown teeth.
Scarlett Shiloh, a staffing coordinator at BU and an MPH student studying health communication and promotion, won the Best Overall award for an infographic encouraging patients to talk about colonoscopies with their doctors.
Xuan, who directs the MPH program’s functional certificate in health communication and promotion, says he started the Health “Comm”petition to raise awareness of the importance of public health work, particularly health communication. He says he noticed that clinical practice often inspires the kind of gratitude that leads to donations, likely because many people have personal experience receiving a treatment that has taken away their pain, but no parallel experience exists in public health to evoke the same level of support.
“[In] defining what success means in public health, particularly in prevention, we often celebrate ‘no news.’ If things are working fine, if there’s no major public health outbreak or emergency, if the community is generally healthy and safe—this is how we define that we’re doing a good job,” says Xuan. “However, this does not necessarily create headlines. I believe that there should be opportunity to celebrate our work.”
Xuan piloted the Health “Comm”petition within the SPH community in 2023 and 2024 before expanding eligibility to the full BUMC community in 2025. He notes that it “takes a village” to pull off the event, and he is proud that the project is now nearly entirely student led. Andrea Kugler, a SPH recent graduate, spearheaded the assembly of this year’s organizing committee.
“I am grateful to everyone in our school community—from the faculty judges to our students participants—for their enthusiastic involvement in this event,” says Xuan. “Having three years of submissions already is a strong foundation, and I hope this marks the beginning of a lasting tradition at BUSPH.”
