Welcome to the May 2025 

Simmons MPH Monthly

Read some highlights from our interview with Tozoe Marton, MA, MS below and find the complete conversation here.

Hi Tozoe, it’s great to be talking with you today! First, I wanted to be sure to ask; you earned your MA in “social policy,” and I was just wondering if you could lay out what that degree and area of study tends to be all about, for those who are not familiar with it?

Well, it’s a lot of things, as you might imagine from the name [laughs]. I am currently a fourth-year PhD student at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management. The PhD in Social Policy includes health policy, but [the program] also has people who are working on policy around wealth building and asset building, while others are working on immigration policy and disability policies. My own work is on health policy. After completing two years of the overall PhD program, you earn a masters in this area of study, so that’s where my master's fits in. But the entire area of study really encompasses a lot and is very diverse.

Very interesting, I wasn’t aware of this. Your emphasis during your studies was global maternal health, so we’d be interested to hear a bit about this focus of yours.

For me the topic is personal. My thoughts always go first to my mother. Sometimes I wonder what people will make of me bringing up my mother’s story each time, but it’s a story that motivated me to become a researcher, to work on a PhD- so I’ve decided over time that it is important for me to tell the story. My family is an immigrant family and I was born in Liberia during a time of intense civil war. On top of the war, the country suffered without much in the way of healthcare services and systems. So this is the social context of my birth. In this environment in Liberia, my mother hemorrhaged during my birth and did not survive the excessive bleeding.  Luckily, I survived and made it from Liberia to Ghana to the US...after learning about the circumstances surrounding my mother's passing, I developed a deep interest in public health while I was at Simmons for my undergraduate degree.

There was some specific work you had done in this space, a research piece around midwifery training at the Kenya Medical Training College, so I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about this research?

Absolutely. This is my PhD dissertation research, so it’s my baby [laughs]. There’s a notion around professionalizing the job of midwife, but historically, it tended to exist more as a form of non-professional care that you might typically receive from a loved one- a set of skills that was passed down from generation to generation, where women taught one another to care for one another through pregnancy and childbirth. Eventually, this tradition became warped under the medical gaze and formal training education was mandated for those performing the role. This process of formal education, for a role that historically was predicated on women teaching one another, outside of formal medical systems and such, became very interesting to me, and I became curious if this formal training mandate really tended to result in better outcomes, or not, for mothers in sub-Saharan Africa.