Siobhan Dodds enjoys tackling big challenges and overcoming the odds. That’s part of why she started taking online courses to earn her master’s in communication and information, with a concentration in strategic digital communications, from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
As an epidemiologist, she manages the Tennessee Integrated Food Safety Centers of Excellence (TN Food Safety CoE), a CDC-funded program designed to assist state health departments build capacity and effectively prevent and respond to foodborne illness outbreaks. She oversees all TN Food Safety activities including grant writing, developing and delivering outbreak trainings, technical assistance, and special projects—including a landscape analysis of food safety in Tennessee Correctional Facilities and the Impact of COVID-19 on Foodborne and Enteric Programs in the United States. She’s been in this position since late 2018 and, in that time, observed gaps in the program’s communications that kept them from being consumed and used effectively.
“As a public health professional who must work with the public to prevent illness, we’re constantly faced with health communications and we’re not good at it. So how do I position myself in a way to be a resource to my program?” queried Dodds.
She instinctively knew the program was in dire need of a strategic communications plan but at that time lacked the foundational knowledge to create one. A new incentive offered by the state gave her the opportunity to get a master’s degree to aid in this endeavor, and that’s when she found the online master’s program at UT’s College of Communication and Information.
Becoming a Public Health Professional
Dodds had no intention of entering a profession where her focus would be foodborne disease but a recruiter from a temp agency had zeroed in on her when she was job hunting while living in Chicago.
“The recruiter didn’t tell me any about the job description. I didn’t see a job description, they just said, ‘Show up here.’ And so, I did. I ended up at the Disease Control Bureau at the Chicago Department of Public Health,” she recalled.
Prior to that, Dodds’ experience in public health included working at the nonprofit Gads Hill Center organizing block parties intended to mitigate obesity and promote healthy eating in Chicago communities that lacked green spaces. But the position was grant-funded for the summer; most often public health positions of this nature are grant-funded with no guarantee of further employment when the grant period is up. She had been chasing grants for two years and that’s when the recruiter called.
In a trial by fire, Dodds was tasked to form a team of graduate students to create a protocol and onboard training to interview people throughout the city who had been diagnosed with campylobacter. The city of Chicago didn’t have the manpower to get the interviews done, so this was their solution, she said. She was told to utilize a website with various resources to assist her in getting the job done.
“So, as someone with no background in disease or disease biology, nothing, I proceeded to go to this website and tried to build a program. The website was cumbersome to navigate, it had fantastic resources but deciphering what was current, what I should use, or shouldn’t use was difficult,” she said.
Nonetheless, Dodds did what she always does and rose to the challenge. She did such a good job that, once she finished, she was offered another temp position running a work group to establish a communicable disease outbreak protocol for the department. Though the city realized they had a rockstar on their hands who, as a temporary worker, wasn’t getting benefits or paid holidays, they tried to hire her. But due to strict regulations, she fell just short of having all the requirements necessary to become a full-time employee. That’s when someone pushed her to apply for the epidemiologist position with the Tennessee Department of Health.
Solving Problems and Creating Strategies
Despite being a “very northern girl,” Dodds couldn’t resist the job offer that was put in front of her. She packed her bags and for the first time in her life headed to the nation’s South. Not long after she arrived she identified communications as one of the areas her program needed to improve upon in a major way.
The Tennessee Integrated Food Safety Center of Excellence is just one of five such centers, referred to as “Food Safety CoEs” by those working there. Each center manages a region of the country and must reapply for grant funding every five years to continue operations, or the center is moved to a different state that applied and qualified for funding. The Tennessee Food Safety CoE was one of the original centers started in 2012 and has maintained its funding ever since.
Because they are solely grant-funded through the federal government, the Food Safety CoEs are not allowed to make a profit in any way—all their resources are free to the public. This makes hiring dedicated communications professionals tricky, so the CoEs rely on people like Dodds to get that work done.
“Epidemiologists were being asked to be communication specialists, so I told my supervisor, ‘Look, we’re going to do a communications strategic plan.’ I had no idea what that looked like or meant,” she said.
The need to improve the Tennessee Integrated Food Safety CoE’s communications increased when it suddenly became responsible for handling the central website for all the Food Safety CoEs; though the centers have their own individual websites and operate semi-independently to create resources and trainings to serve their specific regions, there is one central website operated by a select Food Safety CoE. Due to funding restructuring in 2019, that central website responsibility shifted to Tennessee—and came under Dodds’ purview.
Dodds’ inherited a website that needed a lot of work. The original Food Safety CoE website creators had the best of intentions but again it was created without the right people—communications expert—at the table, impacting the user experience and ultimately becoming in itself a barrier to accessing resources. Dodds identified the critical need to make improvements. That’s when she decided it was time for her to grow her communications skills by earning a master’s degree in the field.
Becoming a Communicator
Though she’s only in her second semester of the program, Dodds said it’s already paid off. Her first semester, she took JREM 513 Audience Analytics and JREM 516 Digital Content Creation Basics, which were very work heavy courses but also very practical ones.
“I was really energized and jazzed to be back in school. Taking those two classes was difficult but they complemented each other really well, and I was able to understand communications really holistically by taking those two classes together,” she said.
The last time she was in school and used online tools for her classes, the experience was subpar. This go around Dodds said she’s been blown away at how effective and engaging her courses are despite being asynchronous. She’s been particularly impressed with the program’s Assistant Professor of Practice Tatia Jacobson Jordan, who taught both of those first classes.
“Dr. Jordan is the coolest, best professor ever. She’s amazing and I’ve never even met her. She does such a good job designing her classes and making it so digestible, and the assignments you work on are just so applicable and I was able to take what I’ve learned from those two classes,” Dodds said, also crediting the program’s web-based learning management system, Canvas, with being sleek and easy to use.
She’s enjoyed that the program also has flexibility around assignments, and even was able to create a brand guide for all the Food Safety CoEs to use—something she said wouldn’t have happened were it not for the class assignment. Outside of that, she has already applied the information she learned in that first semester into drafting a centralized and regional digital strategic marketing plan. Implementing the plan has resulted in smoother processes and has ensured all the regional website resources feed into the central website—thus avoiding the confusing series of links many users encountered in the previous iteration.
Dodds is already plotting out which classes she will take in future semesters, all with the aim of maybe one day changing how government public health professionals can communicate with audiences. She knows the government must be accountable for the taxpayer dollars it uses, hence some of the red tape, but she also believes having a good grasp on strategic communications and digital content creation will give her the upper hand when it comes to advocating for a different approach to communications.
“There’s a need to work with our public health leaders to develop new perspectives and strategies on how to be progressive communicators. From my experience, communities perceive the government as disconnected from them. I ask myself, ‘Why do “mommy bloggers” get more traction with parents than public health?’ There’s a lot of work to be done and my quest is to create a bridge between public health and our communities that fosters trust and mutual understanding,” she said.
For now, she’s going to focus on her schoolwork and graduate in spring 2025 so she can take on that challenge with confidence.