ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Health Education and Promotion
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1601175
This article is part of the Research TopicCatalyzing Public Health Leadership Research, Practice, Education, and TrainingView all 13 articles
The Student Opportunities for AIDS/HIV Research (SOAR) Program: Promoting Public Health Leadership and Transformation for Undergraduate Students Through a Principles-Driven, Cohort-Based Model
Provisionally accepted
- 1School of Social Work, Michigan State University, East Lansing, United States
- 2Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, United States
- 3School of Public Health, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States
- 4School of Education, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States
- 5Department of Women's and Gender Studies, College of Literature, Science and the Arts, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States
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Undergraduate public health degrees have grown over 1,100% over the past twenty years (Leider et al., 2023), not including interdisciplinary scholars who are interested and do not major in the field, marking an opportunity for proactive public health leadership in this burgeoning group of people with potential futures as public health leaders. The Students Opportunities for AIDS/HIV Research Program (SOAR) is a 2-year program funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, providing research training and leadership development to college undergraduates, preparing them for a future as interdisciplinary public health leaders. SOAR is rooted in critical feminist values and utilizes a cohort model, a high impact practice (HIP) (Opacich, 2019), which holds tremendous potential for developing collaborative, transformational leaders (Teitel, 1997) and a multi-tiered mentorship model. Housed in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, in partnership with a CEPH-accredited School of Public Health at an elite predominately white institution (PWI), SOAR focuses on historically underrepresented students as defined by the National Institutes of Health. As an early pathway program to public health leadership, SOAR cultivates behavioral and social science research skills and leadership development at the undergraduate level, earlier than a majority of public health leadership development initiatives. To date, SOAR has four cohorts with two cohorts (N=29) successfully matriculating into public health-oriented graduate programs at both the master’s and doctoral level, the next step in their path to public health leadership. This paper highlights critical practices to proactively support and develop the next generation of public health leadership, beginning at undergraduate education. Key considerations for cultivating and embracing diverse leadership at elite/predominantly white institutions (PWI) are detailed. Approaches to developing cohorts were employed in addition to leveraging key critical, feminist approaches including embracing difference as key to cohort and leadership development, identifying key collective struggles to build cohesion, fostering a community of care, and embracing diversity across numerous social and developmental locations within the cohort. Key learnings and initial outcomes, including curricular and co-curricular components will be described.
Keywords: Social Justice, undergraduate research pipeline, Leadership development, early research development, Feminist Research Approaches, Equity, diversity
Received: 27 Mar 2025; Accepted: 08 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Johnson, Neubauer, Bennett, Bolivar, Kirkland and Harper. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Gabriel Lee Johnson, School of Social Work, Michigan State University, East Lansing, United States
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