Rachael Eddings (MPH ‘15) Turns Public Health Calling into Career
Saint Louis University alum Rachael Eddings, M.P.H. CSP (MPH ‘15) is a non-dietary occupational and residential exposure (ORE) senior scientist for Bayer in St. Louis, a position where she assesses occupational and residential pesticide exposures.
Eddings earned her Master of Public Health degree with a concentration in occupational and environmental health from the Saint Louis University College for Public Health and Social Justice in 2015.
In five years at Bayer, she started in health and safety and then worked her way into a technical science exposure role.
As an ORE senior scientist, Eddings is deeply involved in the multidecade process of pesticide formulation, specifically the regulatory process of development and working with human safety toxicology.
“We utilize this information to understand the range of occupational and residential exposures people might experience —through skin contact, inhalation or even incidental ingestion,” Eddings said. “We evaluate these scenarios for workers and for the general population, including pregnant individuals and women of childbearing age. We also look carefully at potential accidental exposures in children so that, when we bring a product to market, we’re doing everything to support safe use.”
Eddings and her team help develop safety language on labels, as required by law, while selling pesticides. As part of that work, Eddings and her team evaluate what types of personal protective equipment (PPE) applicators should use, as well as the safe work practices they should follow when mixing, applying and handling products. Her team supports North America, New Zealand and Australia, accounting for the uniqueness of each product and region.
Additionally, it is her responsibility to address scenarios for reactions from contact with pesticides, assess re-entry intervals, usage of models developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Health Canada's Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA), and identify effects reported from contact to ask targeted questions and to elicit a better outcome.
“This is product safety, but at the same time it's also public health. We're trying to assess any type of exposure that could potentially happen to protect any individual that might be using the pesticide but also might be in the area where a pesticide is being used,” she said.
On any given day, Eddings may meet with one of the various government agencies to discuss a change in exposure or a policy change. Then, other days consist of monitoring and partnering with national and international task force initiatives while helping enact policy change or providing assessments to colleagues.
Every day looks a little different but many days include taking in data and information to determine exposure assessments to take a deeper dive into human health risks related to any of the products. Eddings and her team also direct the usage of PPE and safe work practices in various settings, and advise colleagues and companies working in environments where PPE is necessary.
The variety of her work and how expansive the spectrum of public health can be is, in many ways, how Eddings found her passion.
She first came to know public health as a premed student when being tasked with deeper questions about vaccines, health, and health communication. That led to the importance of public health making sense for her potential career path.
“I don’t know, it just clicked. I was also enjoying statistics,” she said. “I really appreciate the idea in public health, (that) you're treating a population and you're assessing risk for a population and you're doing it in hopes that we don't have individuals ending up in a hospital room.”
That’s when SLU’s M.P.H. program entered the fold and became a reality for Eddings through a simple Google search.
The curriculum offered, the Jesuit mission, and the community focus drew her to continue her education at the College for Public Health and Social Justice.
“It was just one of those things … just sort of looking to see what potentially could be out there. I know it's not a real fascinating story, but you know, power of technology, I guess,” she said. “It's also the smaller class size that the graduate program really offers because we were able to have a lot of one-on-one (time) with our professors. There's always an open-door policy with faculty and staff. Everyone knew you by first and last name.”
The ability to have a personalized educational experience while obtaining a degree with many plug-ins to faculty and alumni is something Eddings said she valued during her time in the M.P.H. program.
She enjoyed not only the curriculum but the social programming and SLU’s overall emphasis on respecting cultural diversity and differences among students.
One of the unique aspects of the SLU M.P.H. is the program’s emphasis on summer internships, which many students elect to fulfill internationally. Eddings did her internship in Guatemala through a Catholic nonprofit organization.
“It was a challenging experience, but it was an amazing experience because everything that I had learned in that first year at SLU, I was able to apply it. However, I had to apply it in a way that was understanding of the local culture,” she said. “We were there to conduct a quality assurance and quality assessment on water filters that they were using in the area, and they were having an unfortunately high fail rate at the time, (so) it was our job to go in and assess what could be done better.”
The personal touch of being involved with the culture, faculty, other students, or the people she is serving, either here at SLU or abroad, allowed Eddings to develop skills that she still deploys today while working for Bayer.
“That is my number one advice … do what you can to be involved and get involved. Don't be afraid to accept new opportunities and enjoy the adventure as much as you possibly can,” she said. “Organizations here within St. Louis, and local chapters of national organizations, are here to help students by providing resources, mentoring, training events and other valuable experiences.”
College for Public Health and Social Justice
The Saint Louis University College for Public Health and Social Justice is the only academic unit of its kind, studying social, environmental and physical influences that together determine the health and well-being of people and communities. It also is the only accredited school or college of public health among nearly 250 Catholic institutions of higher education in the United States. Guided by a mission of social justice and focus on finding innovative and collaborative solutions for complex health problems, the college offers nationally recognized programs in public health and health administration.