Jessica Thein is in her first year of the Public Health Sciences doctoral program at the Brown School.  In 2009, she earned bachelor’s degrees in Biology and Spanish from Saint Louis University.  After graduating, Jessica worked at Hospital Nacional de Niños in Costa Rica where she saw the detrimental impact poverty had on health.  She returned to St. Louis and received her MSW and MPH from the Brown School in 2014, focusing on Social Determinants of Health and Health Disparities. 

Jessica has a broad range of healthcare experience that allows her to see healthcare as a large system rather than individual parts.  She sees tremendous value in transdisciplinary approaches and enjoys thinking of ways concepts from other disciplines can be used to address health inequity.  She is currently exploring complexity theory and its application to redefining health as an emergent property.  Her research interests lie at the intersection of complex dynamical systems, data science and computational methodologies, and the social science conceptual frameworks employed to understand health.  Little Known Fact: Jessica loves puzzles, escape rooms, scavenger hunts, and puns.