Beth Adams

Ms. Beth Adams was the Health Careers and Education Specialist at South Central AHEC and was an active community partner with the Center for Integrative Environmental Health Science (CIEHS) Community Engagement Center. In June 2021, South Central AHEC and the CIEHS CEC hosted the 2021 Summer Environmental Health Program to engage youth in western Kentucky who are interested in healthcare careers. Ms. Adams graduated from Western Kentucky University with a Master’s in Public Health and continues to be a strong advocate for public health efforts including positive environmental health for youth. Adams has a longstanding interest in health but also explored additional areas of interest in English and History during her undergraduate degree. She is also an alum of the Teach for America program where she taught Biology for two years in a rural community in Mississippi. It was during this transformative experience where she saw a marked lack of resources impacting the community that she realized she wanted to pursue a career in Public Health. Public Health is a field that combines education and promotes an awareness of social determinants of health and heath inequities, which appealed greatly to Adams. Throughout her career, Adams has completed multiple internships, volunteered with vaccine clinics, completed data entry at the Barren River District Health Department, and was a graduate assistant for WKU’s Center for Applied Sciences in Health and Aging (CASHA). 

In this previous role, Ms. Adams planned and prepared programming for high school students in Hardin and Warren counties as well as college students interested in becoming healthcare professionals. The South Central AHEC has partnered with speakers in the area, healthcare professionals, a local domestic violence shelter, Hotel Inc., and the local health department as well as the public health department at WKU. Adams supports environmental health efforts and notes how important it is for practitioners to be knowledgeable about it when striving to treat patients with a more holistic approach to care. She notes that environmental health is not integrated in the curriculum as much as it could be, partially because an awareness of environmental health is more of an abstract skill to have, according to Adams. Adams is committed to emphasizing the importance of environmental health in the United States and in her previous role, she served South Central Kentucky, which included the intersection of multiple environmental health issues, such as air quality, food insecurity, and the presence of radon without affordable radon removal services.