Middlebury Alumni Connect in the Field of Public Health

This is the case with two Middlebury alumni turned colleagues, Benjamin “Benjy” Renton ’21 and Gabriella “Gabby” Chalker ’24, who now conduct research for Brown University’s School of Public Health. 

Earlier this year, Renton, a research associate who works with Ashish K. Jha, Dean of Brown’s School of Public Health, was tasked with finding a research assistant to support two senior fellows undertaking global health work on biosecurity projects and policy in Washington, D.C. To find the right candidate who could start immediately, Renton contacted faculty members at Brown and other institutions, including his alma mater. His email to the Center for Careers and Internships at Middlebury quickly found its way to Pam Berenbaum, Professor of the Practice of Global Health, who recommended Gabby Chalker unequivocally. 

“I never knew [Gabby] which was surprising because I honestly felt like we did a lot of the same things,” says Renton, reflecting on his time in college. His involvement with community engagement at Middlebury started with the Privilege & Poverty Academic Cluster. “I had taken some of the classes that were linked in the cluster. They were of interest to me. And then I sort of just kept going.” As a busy student majoring in International and Global Studies and writing for the student-run newspaper, Middlebury Campus, Renton kept up with community work during his sophomore year as a leader for a MiddView Trip, building homes for Habitat for Humanity. About halfway through his junior year, when his study-abroad trip in China abruptly ended due to Covid-19, Renton began leveraging his skills in journalism to share information about the growing pandemic. With a knack for synthesizing rapidly changing data and making it digestible through his Twitter and posts on his blog, Off the Silk Road, Renton grew a wide following that included educators, scientists, and policymakers beyond Middlebury and Vermont. In January of his senior year, he accepted an offer from Mike Pieciak, Vermont’s current State Treasurer and Vermont’s Commissioner of the Department of Financial Regulation at the time, to work on the state’s pandemic response team. “I just saw it as a really cool opportunity to be involved with the local community and certainly at a time that was very challenging for a lot of people.”

Elsewhere on campus, Chalker was only just beginning her college experience in 2020. As a first-year student, she enrolled in the Community-Connected Learning (CCL) Course offered through the Center for Community Engagement (CCE), which aims to develop students’ civic knowledge, skills, and identity by pairing them with community partners at local nonprofits to complete a semester-long, social change-oriented project. After taking the course, Chalker went on to be the Project Assistant (PA) for the CCL course for four semesters, supporting students on their course projects, holding presentations and discussions on course material during classes, and supervising projects from initial meeting to completion. Chalker regards the CCE as a home while she was at Middlebury: “I really did so many things with the CCE.” 

Knowing that she wanted to pursue the field of public health, but with no standalone public health degree offered through the college, Chalker designed an independent major in health humanities with the support of her advisor, Pam Berebaum. Based on the field of medical humanities, Chalker’s major was much inspired by her work at the CCE, “the things that I had learned there… so much of it is central to the work of public health.” Chalker continued with experiential learning in her chosen field with several Cross-Cultural Community Engagement grants that supported grassroots work abroad with Global Health & Equity at Middlebury/GlobeMed’s partnership with a non-governmental organization (NGO) in Rwanda, and a cycling storytelling project on aging through Copenhagen and Stockholm. Her senior year, Chalker and Middlebury Alumna, Sophia Fatima ’24 were awarded a Projects for Peace grant to design, implement, and manage the Jakarta Youth Climate Leadership Camp, an environmental justice project that extended several months post-graduation. With these project-based experiences under her belt, Chalker stayed in the non-profit sector after graduation, working for a public health research NGO in Kathmandu. Soon after returning to the United States in early 2025, she was hired by Renton and began in her current position as a research assistant for two senior fellows who had worked for a previous presidential administration. 

Chalker credits the PA training she received through the CCL course for teaching her the critical skills she uses in her current role. Relationship building, understanding one’s civic identity, and project management all come into play when convening meetings and gathering research. “We are really trying to focus on bipartisan leadership in global health. Understanding people with different perspectives is very relevant in that case because we are trying to work from commonalities and not the polarized differences.”

Renton, too, points to his college leadership experience for providing him with the communication skills that have translated to his position at Brown. “[B]eing able to write, I think, has been a huge part of what my Middlebury experience taught me, particularly in a role that I am doing now, which is very research-focused.” Renton spends a lot of his time preparing the dean for events, writing op-eds, speeches, and the like. “Being able to communicate your findings in a written way has been super important.”

It is worth noting that both Renton and Chalker believe their understanding of community engagement has evolved since college. While Renton sees communication about global health as a continuation of his undergraduate work, there is now a strategic component to his job that requires leveraging partnerships and connections to drive impact. “We’ve been thinking a lot about climate change. We’ve been thinking a lot about biosecurity and pandemic preparedness. [H]ow do we, in these times, engage with policymakers? How do we engage with people in that D.C. community? That’s something that I think we’re still trying to build up, but has been, in my mind, super exciting.”

For Chalker, the profound shift from grassroots organizing to working in a government space with some of the largest global health organizations has been eye-opening. “I am being exposed to the other side of the global health coin… From a grassroots perspective, we can often be very critical of these large power structures like the World Bank, because they aren’t perfect and they have a lot of flaws. [N]ow that I am on the other side of things… It’s giving me more of a nuanced perspective on how all of these things have to co-exist.” While Chalker says she ultimately doesn’t know where her career will lead, her position at Brown is equipping her with more tools for the work ahead, which she believes will orient back towards the grassroots space: “I’ve always known that I’ve wanted to blend academia and research with on-the-ground community work, community-led solutions, community-led policy.”

While their pathways never overlapped during their time at Middlebury, Renton and Chalker’s gravitation towards community engagement and leadership during those undergraduate years has squarely connected them professionally. Their shared commitment to advancing global health by bridging academia with civic life and public engagement is a testament to the impact of community-engaged learning at Middlebury College and the importance of providing students with a wide variety of real-world experiences to best prepare them for their future careers.