Spatial Epidemiology in Romania: A Student Practicum.
Jenna Zabroski. Photo: Megan Jones
Spatial Epidemiology in Romania: A Student Practicum
While completing her practicum in Bucharest, Romania last summer, MPH student Jenna Zabroski learned how to use geographic information systems software to analyze the spatial distribution of tuberculosis and pediatric cancer in the country.
Although pediatric cancer survival is increasing across Europe, children in Eastern European countries fare worse. In Romania, survival lags behind Western Europe by 11%, suggesting 1 in 10 children with cancer in Romania die unnecessarily.
Last summer, Jenna Zabroski, an MPH student studying epidemiology and biostatistics at the School of Public Health, was presented with the opportunity to travel to Romania to investigate this gap as a research fellow in the Cancer Epidemiology Education in Special Populations (CEESP) Program.
As an undergraduate at the University of Miami, Zabroski studied cancer biology in a lab using colon cancer cells and earned dual bachelor’s degrees in public health and microbiology & immunology. A heavy scientific course load kept her from studying abroad, however, so she was pleased to discover she could pursue cancer epidemiology and global health through an international practicum while earning credit toward her degree at SPH.
Zabroski enlisted the help of her Cancer Epidemiology (EP752) course instructor Megan Healey, clinical associate professor of epidemiology, to polish her CEESP application. After Zabroski was accepted to the program, Healey continued to make herself available to answer Zabroski’s questions.
While Zabroski encountered a variety of unexpected challenges over the course of her research fellowship, she credits her prior SPH coursework with preparing her to come up with workable solutions.
“All of my courses helped me in different ways, especially the core courses,” says Zabroski. “For example, the leadership course helped me with how to develop a presentation and how to present to an audience. My quantitative courses helped me to build foundational skills—whether you choose to go the SAS or R route in the case of epidemiology and biostatistics students, most mentors are open to working with any data and analysis software as long as you’re comfortable with it. In my case, I worked with SaaS, but I still had to learn things along the way. Being proactive, asking questions whenever I had them really helped me.”
Zabroski also recommends approaching research opportunities with an open mind.
“Dr. [Amr] Soliman, the organizer of the [CEESP] program, loves persistence and adaptability,” she says. “Research is always going to change. Be open to navigating that”
In Zabroski’s case, there were delays in obtaining the data she was supposed to be working with in Romania and she was temporarily reassigned to collaborate with a team from the geography department the University of Bucharest. There, she learned for the first time how to use open-source geographic information systems (GIS) software, QGIS and GeoDa, to create maps and conduct geospatial analysis. Her flexibility with redirection paid off, and her first first-author manuscript “Geospatial analysis of tuberculosis incidence in relation to socio-economic and environmental indicators in Romania” was published in Frontiers in Public Health in December 2025.
Zabroski discussed with SPH her impressions after visiting Romania for the first time, her ongoing work with researchers in Bucharest, and the lessons she will take carry with her when she graduates come May.
Q&A
With Jenna Zabroski, on-campus MPH student and 2025 CEESP research fellow
SPH: Notably, you had to pivot your work in Romania when your access to the country’s cancer data was delayed; did you face other challenges over the course of your research fellowship?
Zabroski: In class, to complete a homework assignment or problems, we’re often given an already clean dataset. [But] in real-world data, you have to learn to clean and figure out how to perfect the data analysis once you run it, so that’s another challenge that I [faced]. And it’s not that I didn’t expect it, but it definitely helped me to learn to clean data in different ways using different software.
SPH: How was your first time in Romania? Given the chance, would you return? What is one thing you did not know about the country before visiting?
Zabroski: I definitely would love to go back if I could. I did not know that Romania had the biggest black bear population in Europe—there’s this one road out on the countryside and you can stop on the side of the road and feed the black bears. I also had the opportunity to visit a few different castles in the country. In Transylvania, I had the opportunity to visit the Bran Castle and Dracula’s Castle, which was a really cool experience. Just immersing myself in the culture and learning about their language, food, and ethnic background was a really unique experience for me. I was grateful to have Romanian mentors to help me navigate that.
SPH: Would you recommend CEESP to other MPH students? What did you appreciate about the program?
Zabroski: I really liked the program because it combined research and mentorship with a global perspective [on public health]. You also get the opportunity to be a first author on a publishable manuscript, which I think is really unique for a master’s level program. The practicum allowed me to step out of my comfort zone and build new connections with different mentors. Now that I’m working on a second project remotely, they’re trying to get me to come back to Romania this upcoming summer. Working in a global research context showed me how powerful data can be and how it can drive different policymaking techniques—that’s the end-goal with the paper I’m working on now about pediatric cancer survival outcomes in relation to different socioeconomic characteristics.
