My name is Ana Carolina Ramos Velásquez. I was born in Tegucigalpa, capital city of Honduras but grew up in the industrial city of San Pedro Sula, Honduras. I obtained my Bachelor’s on Socioeconomic Development and Environment Engineering from Zamorano University in Honduras. Zamorano´s learning by doing concept in an agricultural setting help me gained a great interest in environmental science and a drive to help communities.
Furthering my environmental science interest, especially on water monitoring and treatment, I did a Master of Science in Civil Engineering at the University of Texas at San Antonio in the United States. There I worked as a Research and Teaching Assistant on the water quality lab of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department.
When I graduated I went back to Honduras to apply my new knowledge and I worked as an environmental consultant. There I gained experience working with different environmental management projects, environmental impact assessments and the opportunity to work with a range of stakeholders. Also, my interest in other areas of environmental science broadened, specially on environmental health.
Fortunately, I was granted a scholarship with the Erasmus Europubhealth program to do a Master of Public Health (MPH). I did my first year of MPH in the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom and my second year on environmental and occupational health specialization in the French School of Public Health in Paris. At my second year of the MPH in Paris, I learned many new concepts and tools, and opened my eyes to a new point of view of the application of environmental management and health.
While working on my MPH internship at Irset in Rennes France, I really liked applying environmental epidemiology research and listening to the seminars of PhD students that worked on environmental health. This gave me the boost to apply to a PhD where I could combine a little bit of my previous knowledge of environmental science and my new interest on environmental health. Focusing on Health Impact Assessment with systems approach of cities offered by the SURREAL project, felt like the perfect fit to apply my experiences and a great way of knowledge translation that would help the most people.
