Building Public Health Mentorship Traditions with Jill Tamashiro

Jill Tamashiro (MPH, 2010)

Like many of us in public health Jill Tamashiro (MPH, 2010) has had a windy career path to the field. Her undergraduate degree was in occupational therapy and she worked in skilled nursing facilities, and in outpatient mental health capacities before returning to school to earn her Master in Public Health at UH Mānoa.

From an internship with Kokua Kalihi Valley, Tamashiro fell in love with community health. She switched careers and started working at Waianae Coast Comprehensive Health Center in an education program, then moved to the National Kidney Foundation of Hawai‘i. Eventually she landed at the Hawai‘i State Department of Health, and has served there as a public health educator for over 12 years.

Currently, Tamashiro is the lead public health educator and section supervisor of the Tobacco Prevention and Control Section. Her work focuses on tobacco prevention and cessation, youth programs, issues related to secondhand smoke and health disparities. In addition to programmatic work, Tamashiro works on tobacco prevention policies and manages staff including other Department of Public Health Sciences (DPHS) graduates.

Tamashiro has been both a mentor and a mentee of those who have gone through UH Mānoa’s public health program. As such, she is part of a local public health legacy. She fondly refers to her former mentors Lila Johnson (MPH, 1994), Kat Koga (MPH, 1978), and Gerald Ohta, among others, as “old school” public health folks, and describes their deep commitment to the community. They also graduated from UH Mānoa’s public health programs. 

Lila Johnson (MPH, 1994)

Johnson in particular is Tamashiro’s predecessor at the DOH. Tamashiro feels fortunate to have worked with Johndon and said that, “I learned a lot through Lila and how she handled the office…we make sure that when people start, they’re integrated both socially and professionally.” 

Tamashiro hesitates to call herself a mentor, but over the years she has taken a number of recent graduates under her wing, and has found ways to leverage their varied skills into meaningful roles within her project. Currently, she works with three recent grads from the DPHS.

She credits Lisa Kehl and the DPHS as providing a workforce pipeline, “...It’s been a really great conduit to find great, skilled, and motivated students that want to be in public health…It’s such a nice partnership.”

Like her mentors, Tamashiro is now part of an enduring tradition of UH public health alumni working with recent grads from this program to protect and promote the health of those in Hawai‘i and beyond. 

For more about Jill Tamashiro, visit her Alumna profile here.