From seatbelts to smoke alarms, public health policy permeates our daily lives—but few people are familiar with the field. Ana Rita Gonzalez, BSPH '94 (ScD), has sought to change that through a series of children's books, Athena's Adventures in Health Policy, that teach children how health policy shapes our world.
The series includes 10 books for age groups ranging from 3 to 12 years old and six books for ages 13–18. They follow Athena as she learns about recycling, cancer prevention, and more. Gonzalez's health policy consulting company, Policy Wisdom, publishes the books through Amazon and donates proceeds to Global Health Now, a news aggregator run by the Bloomberg School of Public Health.
These books continue Gonzalez's 40-year legacy of shaping health policy, for which she won the 2023 Johns Hopkins Alumni Global Achievement Award.
"It's a wonderful semicolon in my journey," she says. "I've done what I set out to do, but there's still much more, too."
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