Antioch Graduates Making Change

Nina Harawa ’92
Major: Biology/Chemistry

Nina Harawa ’92 could have been a doctor, but her experience
at Antioch opened wider doors for her. “Antioch always got me
to think about things on a bigger level,” Nina says. “Why is it that groups of people tend to get sick, and what are the social
ramifications?”

Nina came to Antioch as a fairly unlikely prospective student in the late 80s. Born in Malawi in Central Africa, she grew up in a traditional, religious family in Dayton, Ohio. Her father was a professor at the Catholic University of Dayton and she could have attended school there free of charge, but there was a certain spark of energy that set Antioch students apart from the others. “I remember two students sitting in front of me at a weekend event in a heated argument about math,” she said. “It was a place I felt students were engaged in learning about books, ideas, and the ways of the world outside of the classroom.”

Nina won a minority science scholarship and came to Antioch to study biochemistry. During Nina’s second year, she went to Atlanta on co-op to work for a fair housing agency and ended up volunteering for an agency next door that delivered food to people with HIV and AIDS. “It was a very moving and fulfilling experience for me. My first one with AIDS. Unfortunately, almost all the people getting help were black, and there were almost no other black volunteers,” she said.

By the time she went to Los Angeles on co-op her fourth year to work at a clinic for Central American refugees, Nina had decided she would not be satisfied with a job as a physician, where she would be dealing with issues only on an individual level. Antioch had spurred her commitment to question the social order, and she wanted to go into public health.

After graduation, Nina returned to L.A. to get an M.A. in public health and then a Ph.D in epidemiology from the University of California. Ties to Antioch only grew stronger when she married former classmate Doug Fischer ’92.

For her dissertation, Nina threaded her experience with AIDS with her interest in racial issues and focused on racial disparities in health, using HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases as an example.

Today she works for L.A. County’s health department writing grants and designing health studies using subjects in surrounding communities. She said she is aware that many researchers never give back information to the communities that supply the data, and she is trying hard to give back to the areas she works with.

Her department is currently working on surveying single occupancy hotels in Skid Row to gauge the community’s attitudes toward HIV, its levels of HIV infection, and the effectiveness of prevention services. She is also working on getting a similar project off the ground in the L.A. County jail system. A third study would focus on testing and risk behaviors among transgender women and female sex workers. “I do look at things in the world and think how I could change them,” Nina said. “That attitude was instilled and strengthened at Antioch.”

Join us in celebrating their pursuit of new venues:

• Doug Fischer ’92
• Dylan Wrynn ’92
• Molly Schultz ’98
• Alexander Stadtner ’00
• Rafael Torch ’02

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