February 1: Cokie Young

Cokie Young is a graduate student at Duke University where she studies Bioethics and Science Policy. Prior to enrolling at Duke, Cokie earned her BA in Neuroscience and Spanish from Vanderbilt University in 2019. During her undergraduate career, she studied in communities in countries across the globe, including Cuba, Ecuador, Peru, and Tanzania, in order to better understand how to make healthcare and education more accessible to low-income communities of color both at home and abroad. As a Duke-Margolis Scholar, Cokie’s interests center on creating equitable health policy as a means to confront racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in healthcare. Currently, her work explores not only how racism and other forms of discrimination inform larger systemic issues, but also how to challenge these existing structures when cultivating solutions across different audiences. More specifically, she is working to increase equitable access to primary care & COVID-19 resources and to improve the responsiveness of local health systems at the community level for historically marginalized populations.