Jaynia Anderson

Epidemiology MPH’14

Research Scientist, Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health Division of California Department of Public Health

Jaynia Anderson came to Rollins with an interest in MCH based on her volunteer work at a free women’s clinic. She joined the second ever MCH certificate in addition to her epidemiology focus. One of her fondest memories from Rollins was her practicum, for which she traveled to Cape Town, South Africa and implemented her own small study on access to abortion services with a local nonprofit.

After graduating, Anderson completed an epidemiology fellowship with the California Department of Public Health. She worked in injury and violence prevention, focusing on decreasing child maltreatment and other adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). After this fellowship, she joined a traffic safety project, followed by substance use (opioids, cannabis) projects, and ultimately ended up in the Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health Division (MCAH) serving as a Research Scientist.

In this role, she is a lead epidemiologist for the Maternal and Infant Health Assessment program, California’s version of the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS). She helps coordinate the development and implementation of the questionnaire, conducts analyses in SAS that focus on health and birth outcomes and experiences during and shortly after pregnancy, and provides data to inform MCAH services in California. When COVID-19 hit California, Anderson was reassigned to county level data monitoring for the pandemic, and she has been working from home with her two dogs.

Anderson recommends keeping an open mind to the different areas of MCH and to departments other than your own while at Rollins, since a diversity of knowledge will serve you well in your future career. As she puts it, “In reality most positions aren’t just going to be doing one thing, I’ve really had to do a lot of different pieces of public health that are outside of epidemiology.”