Launch Year-Long Community Impact Projects at Stanford Youth Public Health Accelerator (YPHA) Kickoff

By Catherine Wu, Global Helath Communications Assistant and Co-Executive Director of the Stanford Youth Public Health Accelerator

On a Saturday afternoon at the Stanford School of Medicine in October 2026, 30 high school students took turns explaining a public health challenge in their community they’d come to fix. One student plans to design comics to ease children’s fear of vaccines. Another is mapping EMS response times in San Francisco to assess disparities in emergency care. Others are creating educational Narcan trainings and vaping prevention lessons for Bay Area communities. Still others are focusing outside of the Bay, including a project on cardiovascular care access in rural Ecuador.

This kickoff event for the Stanford Youth Public Health Accelerator (YPHA) launched an inaugural cohort of 20 student teams within the Bay Area and 5 teams from other locations around the U.S., who are participating virtually. Led by Stanford undergraduates through the Undergraduate Global Health Club and the Stanford Journal of Public Health, YPHA pairs each high school team with a dedicated Stanford undergraduate mentor for a full year, accelerating” students’ initial ideas in public and global health into a project that serves their community over a sustained period of time, in the style of a Silicon Valley incubator.

“We chose to mentor high schoolers because they have a unique combination of energy and ideas that we hope to channel into longitudinal community impact programs around the Bay Area and abroad,” said Max Yang, a co- executive director of YPHA. Along the way, we hope to teach them the principles to be effective public health leaders and changemakers.”

During the kickoff, Dr. Amanda Marr Chung, DrPH, MPH, executive director of the Center for Innovation in Global Health (CIGH), provided an introduction to the fundamentals of public health, sharing insights from her own work in public and global health. Students next took part in a hands-on workshop on literature reviews to understand the background and current landscape of their health challenges, then participated in roundtable discussions to discuss the first step of their year-long projects.

YPHA was inspired by a tuberculosis (TB) outbreak in San Francisco in early 2026. “While TB may seem like a disease of the distant past here in the US, we were reminded that local health really is an integral part of global health,” said Yang.

In the spring, the Stanford Journal of Public Health collaborated with TBFighters — a global health organization committed to fighting the structural causes of infectious diseases — to produce a themed issue on tuberculosis advocacy. The Undergraduate Global Health Club also expanded initiatives in its Together Against Tuberculosis (TAT) committee.

YPHA held an initial public health symposium in April 2026, 1-on-1 mentorship for high school students during the spring, and group workshops over the summer. After seeing the strong interest from high school students to be more involved, YPHA launched its official program for cohorts of high school students this October.

Over the coming months, cohort members will attend monthly workshops, including a lightning talk session in January. The year ends with an in-person symposium at Stanford in May, where students will present their community intervention to the public and global health community at Stanford as well as the wider Bay Area.

CIGH is a supporting partner of this program. Learn more about this program at ypha.site.