Michelle Yiu is a second-generation Chinese-American studying Public Health and Integrative Biology with minors in Public Policy and Asian American Studies. Instilled with values of whole-person health and preventive care by her mother, a Yijin Chinese exercise practitioner, she has wanted to work in the health care field from a young age. After being introduced to public health at UC Berkeley, her interests primarily lie in health policy, community health, health advocacy, and holistic health education.
As a public health advocate, she strongly believes in the importance of addressing social determinants of health (SDOH) in promoting health equity. She has worked in various public health spaces both on and off campus as a resource navigator, caseworker, health educator, and advocate. Within all these various capacities, she has increasingly grown to recognize policy as the ultimate upstream intervention for addressing SDOH on a structural scale. This past Fall 2021 semester, as a participant in the UCDC program, she worked as a Health Policy Fellow at the Alliance for Health Policy. At the Alliance, she spearheaded the "Policymaking to Support the Health of Native American People" briefing, contributed to a technical assistance project for senior policy leaders, and constructed landscape analyses and policy memos on various health policy topics. This summer, Michelle hopes to gain insight into health policymaking at the state-level by interning in a state government office that prioritizes improving health outcomes for all Californians.
Major(s): Public Health, Integrative Biology
Minor(s): Public Policy, Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies