Chronic disease and healthcare inequality have become major challenges across the United States, especially in low-income communities where barriers like food insecurity, financial stress, limited transportation, chronic stress, and lack of access to preventative healthcare make staying healthy much more difficult. This photo essay explores these overlapping issues through the lenses of public health, nutrition science, psychology, sociology, economics, and integrative health in order to better understand why chronic disease disparities continue to exist and why there is no single easy solution.

Using both images and peer-reviewed research, this project looks at the visible and invisible factors that contribute to chronic illness while also highlighting prevention, education, community support, and whole-person approaches to healthcare. Looking at this issue through multiple disciplines helped me realize how connected these systems really are. To me, chronic disease inequality feels a lot like an interconnected web, where stress, food access, healthcare, environment, and financial stability all influence one another beneath the surface. Creating meaningful long-term change will require stronger support, collaboration, and more accessible resources within communities over time.

The word “consent” has become quite a buzzword in recent years, often used in the context of sexual scenarios. The stigmas surrounding this word is one of the reasons the topic of consent education for youth is considered to be controversial. With that being said the word consent and the word sex are not exclusionary, meaning consent does not just refer to willfully agreeing to engage in sexual acts. Consent can and does relate to many other parts of life. Teaching kids about consent and body autonomy has many benefits. It helps keep them safe from predators, it builds a good social-emotional foundation, it enhances communication and self-advocacy skills, and sets a good foundation for when sex-education becomes a part of the curriculum. So, how do we begin teaching about topics of consent and body autonomy from beginning in kindergarten all the way to twelve grade? This photo essay addresses the lack of consent-based sex education as a nationwide wicked problem and solves it using an interdisciplinary approach.

This interdisciplinary senior project explores barriers to social and behavioral healthcare services for undocumented and mixed-status families. Using perspectives from social work, criminal justice, psychology, and public policy, the project examines how immigration status, language barriers, fear of deportation, financial hardship, and limited culturally responsive care contribute to unequal access to services. The project also highlights the emotional and systemic impacts these barriers have on children and families. As part of the project, I created a bilingual, trauma-informed digital resource guide designed to improve accessibility to healthcare and community support services. Through research, visual storytelling, and interdisciplinary analysis, this project emphasizes the importance of equity, advocacy, and culturally responsive approaches in supporting underserved communities. 

This photo essay explores public art in shared public spaces as a "wicked problem" involving competing perspectives surrounding artistic expression, tourism, economics, community identity, and public participation. Public art is often intended to enhance environments, improve the image and experience of a place, encourage interaction, attract visitors, and contribute positively to the experience of people sharing public spaces. At the same time, public art can become controversial when communities feel disconnected from the artwork itself or from the decision-making process behind it.

Drawing from Business, Journalism and Mass Communication, and Media Arts perspectives, this project examines how public art decisions involve much more than simply determining whether artwork is aesthetically successful or unsuccessful. Through examples of public art installations, protests, hearings, reinterpretation, and community response, the essay explores how shared public spaces can become sites of debate surrounding identity, representation, and who has influence over the artwork placed within those spaces.

Standing along the shoreline of Arcata Bay, the environment appears calm, natural, and untouched. However, beneath the surface, pollution continues building within the ecosystem through plastic waste, runoff, chemicals, and microplastics. This photo essay explores ocean pollution in Humboldt County's bay as a wicked problem because it has multiple causes, no simple solution, and long-term environmental consequences. Pollution enters waterways through littering, storm drains, consumer waste, and industrial systems before eventually reaching the ocean. Over time, plastics break down into microplastics that become nearly impossible to remove from ecosystems. 

Through photographs of mudflats, shoreline textures, water movement, isolated objects, and empty coastal landscapes, this project explores how environmental damage can exist quietly within spaces that still appear visually beautiful. The photographs and written reflections work together to show how pollution slowly impacts marine ecosystems, wildlife, water quality, and local communities throughout Humboldt County.

The problem I decided to investigate was urban sprawl: the social and environmental impacts of suburban expansion. This is an inherently interdisciplinary problem, as suburbia is constructed out of ideals and cultural norms as much as it is timber and concrete. I use a critical lens to explore the historical origins of suburbia and how that impacts the current formation of urban development. I also provide my own perspective growing up in suburbia, and the love that I still have for my hometown- in comparison to my experience living abroad in the Netherlands, and how that altered my expectations for public infrastructure. I explain how, in my opinion, slowing the spread of urban sprawl relies just as much on altering public perception as it does implementing more socially and environmentally friendly policies. The zine is themed around the Arcade Fire album "The Suburbs", and is interspersed with lyrics from various songs. 

Fire is an important aspect of forest health and is a normal and positive ecosystem disturbance. Since the onset of colonization in the American west and particularly in California, the primary management practice regarding fire has been one of absolute suppression. It has historically been illegal for Indigenous peoples and settlers alike to put fire on the landscape, even for the betterment of food systems or ecological health. In the case of Cultural fire practices in Indigenous communities, the suppression of fire is also the suppression of culture and has largely denied access to Traditional Ecological Knowledge. Plants also suffer from the effects of fire suppression, as a buildup of woody fuels create conditions for catastrophic wildfires which drastically alter the landscape and change the composition of plant communities. Geospatial sciences allow a window into data analysis of the interactions between plants and fire and help modern humans understand the effects of fire suppression on the landscape level.