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Get the most interesting and important stories from the University of Pittsburgh.Jill Henning (SPH ’08G), professor of biology at Pitt-Johnstown, describes herself as a researcher who teaches. With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, Henning, who studies immunology and infectious diseases, emerged as an educator beyond the classroom — becoming a leading voice of public health in Southwestern Pennsylvania.
Armed with 14 years of experience breaking down complex concepts for her students and Star Wars metaphors — Luke is a vaccine aiming to take out the COVID-19 Death Star — she scaled up her teaching practice to communicate COVID-19 mitigation best practices and the value of vaccinations to keep people in the region safe.
“I’ve studied viruses and diseases my whole career, and when the pandemic happened, I was finally able to help,” she said.
Even before the pandemic, Henning’s research was benefiting the region. Her multiyear study on the risk of Lyme disease in Western Pennsylvania concluded that one in three deer ticks carry the Lyme bacteria. When the University shut down at the beginning of the pandemic, she shifted her focus from biting bugs to COVID-19, the kind of public health crisis zoonotic infectious disease scientists, including Henning, refer to as their Super Bowl.
Henning, a consummate collaborator, was instrumental in forming regional coalitions — including In This Together Cambria, which Pitt recognized with a Partnership of Distinction Award at the 2023 Community Engaged Scholarship Forum — and launching an online town hall forum series featuring herself, Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Pitt-Johnstown Matt Tracey and other community figures. She was a featured columnist in The Tribune-Democrat COVID-19: Your Questions column and a mainstay of Wellness Wednesdays, an outreach effort delivering COVID-19 vaccines to rural areas. Currently, Henning serves on the executive board of the Cambria-Somerset COVID-19 Task Force.
Three years into the pandemic, Cambria County touts a 60% vaccination rate (residents receiving at least one dose), and neighboring Somerset County stands at 54%. While those rates are considerably lower than in urban Pennsylvania, they’re higher than their surrounding rural neighbors.
[See all of the 2023 Community Engaged Scholarship Forum awardees]
Pittwire asked Henning to share what it takes to connect with people during public health crises and how supporting her community has impacted her future research.
How did your and your colleagues' education efforts contribute to these success rates?
We tried every possible way to reach people.
Much of public health is centered around interpersonal communication, so often, the best way to get information out is to show that people are talking to each other.
One way we did that was with the Because It’s Home videos, where notable Cambria County current and former residents — including Alan Baylock from The One O'Clock Lab Band and Dana Heinzea, former head equipment manager of the Pittsburgh Penguins — recorded videos promoting COVID-19 mitigation efforts and offering messages of support.
We wanted to show humanity during the pandemic, so we asked residents to share their COVID impact stories: personal reflections about the people they lost or why they chose to get vaccinated.
The 12 virtual town halls sponsored by In This Together Cambria also had a large impact. We reached the people we needed to reach with that initiative. About 50 viewers streamed the program live per airing, and if people didn’t watch town halls live, they watched it later. We had about 46,000 views on Facebook and Instagram. Our website also garnered about 30,000 page views since its launch in December 2020 — if those views solely came from people in Somerset and Cambria counties, that would be about 4.2 views per IP address.
What do you wish more people knew about pandemics?
I’ve been teaching ecology of infectious disease for almost 10 years, and in that class, we cover different types of pandemics. Before 2020, I told my students the next pandemic would be a coronavirus, based on research published in 2013.
Science has something called the molecular clock that measures evolutionary divergence. We can predict when an RNA virus will mutate but not what mutation it will have. After the SARS pandemic in the early 2000s, much research looked into the natural reservoir of coronaviruses.
In the case of SARS-CoV-2, we know the "parent" strain was from a bat. While there has been debate in the intelligence community surrounding the origin, zoonotic viruses jump from animals to humans, originate in a nonhuman animal and mutate, either by natural mutation or by moving to an intermediate species and then to humans.
It wasn’t a hard job to assume a coronavirus would be the next global pandemic based on the science we knew at the time.
You were a first-generation college student born and raised in Indiana County, Pennsylvania, in an area similar to where you work. How did you come to study infectious diseases?
I knew I wanted to study diseases. When I was young, I actually wrote “Dr. Jill Montgomery, pathologist” on a piece of yellow construction paper and taped it above my bed. I used that sign to keep me motivated in high school.
After taking all of the biology classes in undergrad, I knew I wanted to combine my love of being outside and indoor laboratory work. I discovered public health was the way to do that because I can combine my love of studying infectious diseases and the animals who help transmit them and the environment they’re in.
[How the pandemic inspired this Pitt grad student to pursue public health.]
What’s unique to practicing public health in rural communities?
When you’re working with rural populations, you need to meet people where they are. By definition, rural populations are spread out, so we travel to them instead of asking them to come to us, whereas in a place like Pittsburgh, people can access public transportation to seek treatment. When children ride a school bus for 35 minutes one way, even having an event at a school can be a hardship for a family.
Last year, I helped with Wellness Wednesdays, a project of the Cambria-Somerset COVID-19 Task Force. We visited rural areas and provided vaccinations and $50 Giant Eagle gift cards to participants.
We also partnered with several local medical doctors' offices to administer vaccines. The Richland Family Health Center has been traveling in a van to people who are homebound, which is also an important aspect of rural health.
What’s stood out to me about Wellness Wednesdays is how often I’ve had conversations with people who say, “I wasn’t going to get the vaccine, but then you answered my questions and didn’t make me feel uncomfortable.”
How has your experience leading COVID-19 mitigation efforts impacted your research?
When the University shut down, I closed my Lyme disease lab and redirected my research to public education. During the pandemic, one of the things I learned was that the first lie is the lie that wins. And even if you come back later with the truth, it's hard to change people's perceptions if that lie got out first.
One of the things I'm working on now is scientific literacy. I'm studying vaccine hesitancy and what influenced some people to change their minds.
It wasn’t just my college-level infectious disease class that knew the next pandemic would be a coronavirus. Scientists need to do a better job telling the world what is happening.
Science has its language, and if you don’t know how to speak it, you don’t know how to consume it. There is a way to make science relatable without diminishing its quality.
— Nichole Faina, photography by Aimee Obidzinski