Our future's brightest: Leveraging interdisciplinary graduate student teams to deliver innovative approaches to an urban health disparity

Case competitions are an established method for enhancing the education of students in public health and health-related professions. However, many existing competitions do not broadly or intentionally integrate students from other professions such as law, engineering, and business. Further, these competitions often focus on sentinel events or on global health concerns. While important issues, such an approach can ignore public health concerns and health disparities occurring in close proximity to the institution(s) involved in the competition. Finally, such competitions may fall short in leveraging local expertise or involving local community groups working to address important health issues.

This paper presents lessons learned from a novel, interdisciplinary case competition that involved graduate and professional students from both health-related and non-health related disciplines across a major urban research university. Attitudes towards and learning outcomes related to interdisciplinary education, public health, and health disparities as reported by both students and faculty involved in the competition are presented. This paper also shares innovative solutions to one urban health disparity - child obesity - developed by students in the competition.

Implications for educators and community leaders include how to engage a broad array of graduate and professional students in address pressing issues in communities surrounding the academic institution, how to encourage effective participation and collaboration among interdisciplinary team members, and how to enhance and expand interdisciplinary education efforts through a thoughtful and targeted interdisciplinary case competition.