The dedication and innovation from our students in public health practice and research are part of what makes our department great. This summer we recognize several students in our department who have been selected for awards at the University of Washington. We would like to celebrate two of our students – Brekken Selah and Tessa Concepcion – for receiving School of Public health (SPH) Excellence Awards, and congratulate Grace Umutesi on the Runner Up and People’s Choice Awards for the 2025 UW Three Minute Thesis Competition. Congratulations!
Brekken Selah, MPH in Global Health Graduate
2025 UW School of Public Health Excellence Award Winner, Outstanding Master's Student, Department of Global health
The School of Public Health Excellence Awards celebrate members of the SPH community for their dedication, service, and contributions to public health, and are given to students (undergraduate/graduate), staff and faculty across the different departments within the SPH. This year Brekken Selah was chosen as the Outstanding Master’s Student for the Department of Global health.
Brekken, a first-generation descendant of the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, is a recent graduate of the Department of Global Health Master’s program. During her time in the MPH program, she worked on the Rural Health Equity Research Network’s project, GROW-RURAL, as a research fellow focused on rural cardiovascular health. She presented her work on strengthening health research reporting involving Indigenous populations at a semi-annual network meeting in Suquamish, WA, and co-authored several abstracts which are now in the final stages of manuscript preparation. Brekken impressed her mentors with how well received her work was in exploring models of community-based cardiovascular care with the local Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. Upon graduating, the GROW-RURAL project team extended her an offer as a research scientist for one year, as she considers the possibility of enrolling in a PhD program. Brekken’s unwavering commitment to bettering the health of rural and native communities made her an excellent recipient for the SPH Excellence Award.
Tessa Concepcion, PhD Graduate in Implementation Science
2025 UW School of Public Health Excellence Award Winner, Outstanding Doctoral Student, Department of Global Health
This year Tessa was chosen as the Outstanding Doctoral Student for the Department of Global Health. Tessa successfully defended her dissertation in March 2025 and received her PhD in Implementation Science this spring. Her time as a PhD student at the UW was nothing short of extraordinary. She has dozens of publications in peer-reviewed journals where she addresses global health disparities - primarily in maternal health. She presented her cutting-edge work at several prominent implementation science conferences across the world (CROI, IAPAC, HIVR4P, D&I). During the second year of her PhD, she received funding from the NIH for her dissertation work with Global WACh at UW and Kenyatta National Hospital in Kenya, which focused on preferences for long-acting PrEP among pregnant women, and helped lay the policy groundwork for introducing long-acting methods into health systems for pregnant populations. She also served as a dedicated mentor to several MPH students and research assistants, and even conducted abstract and manuscript development trainings with Kenyan collaborators. Now working as a postdoctoral researcher in DGH, Tessa’s work focuses on implementing and evaluating evidence-based interventions to support the sexual and reproductive health of pregnant and postpartum women in low-resource countries. Her outstanding achievements as a recent PhD graduate and her transformative impact in the field of global health make her an excellent awardee for the 2025 SPH Excellence Award, and we wish her the best in her very promising career path.
Grace Umutesi, PhD Graduate in Implementation Science
The University of Washington Three Minute Thesis Competition, Runner Up and People’s Choice Award
Grace is a public health practitioner and researcher, who joined the DGH from Partners in Health-Rwanda (PIH/IMB), where she supported the implementation of several clinical program activities and projects. She has devoted her academic and professional work to designing and implementing innovative strategies to improve health outcomes. Her work spans from supporting Polio surveillance in West Africa and Yellow Fever outbreak response activities in DRC, to managing health system strengthening activities in Rwanda. More recently, she supported initiatives that generate evidence to improve equitable access to diagnostics services in LMICs and inform strategy to improve HPV vaccination coverage in Kenya. In May, Grace competed in the 2025 UW Three Minute Thesis Competition, which features ten outstanding graduate student presenters from eight schools across the UW, and celebrates the capstones and research experiences of master’s and doctoral students at the university. Proposal selection is based on capstone/research project summary and the impact of the project, and during the competition, students must present their capstone/research project in three minutes using only one slide. Grace was named Runner Up and earned the People’s Choice Award. She drew on her lived experience in East Africa, where she had worked to strengthen local health systems. Her talk, “Single-Dose HPV Vaccination: A Dose of Hope in the Fight Against Cervical Cancer in East Africa,” highlighted the promise of a simplified approach to a lifesaving prevention for women in Africa. We would like to congratulate Grace on this outstanding accomplishment, and wish her the best as she embarks on the next step of her global health journey.