Rhodes scholar returns to Gillings

Takhona Hlatshwako ’22 has never wavered in her intent to use her public health knowledge to help her home of Eswatini, a southern African country devastated by HIV. But as the health conditions changed in her homeland (formerly known as Swaziland), so did her focus.

“I ended up not doing any of the courses I said I was going to do once I got the Rhodes,” said Hlatshwako, who earned a bachelor’s degree in health policy and management from the Gillings School of Global Health. She wound up using her prestigious Rhodes Scholarship to earn two advanced degrees from Oxford University in England, one focused on global epidemiology research and the other on social and health policy.

“The reason I went into public health was seeing an epidemic ravage my community. But what we’re seeing now is a rise in noncommunicable diseases,” she said. To handle these illnesses — cancer, heart disease, diabetes —a country needs a strong health system and other resources. Low-wealth countries dealing with infectious diseases like HIV or COVID-19 at the same time face the hardest challenges.

“How do we tackle the double burden of communicable diseases and noncommunicable diseases? That’s really where my mind’s at right now,” Hlatshwako said. “I hope to have opportunities to explore that further through the doctoral program.”

For that, Hlatshwako is returning to Gillings, where she studied public health as an undergraduate, now as a member of the prestigious Royster Society of Fellows.

Serendipity and scholarship

So how does someone who grew up more than 8,000 miles away from Chapel Hill find her way to Carolina? “I would say it was serendipity, and things worked so well in my favor,” Hlatshwako said.

Her journey began in another country — Armenia. Hlatshwako received a full scholarship to attend United World College Dilijan for her last two years of high school so she could earn an international baccalaureate.

(Submitted photo)

Hlatshwako told the college admissions adviser there that she wanted to study public health, but she’d have to get a full ride. The adviser told her about the Morehead-Cain, Carolina’s fully funded merit scholarship modeled on Oxford’s Rhodes, and later nominated Hlatshwako for it.

“The reason I say it was serendipity is that it just so happened that Carolina has one of the best public health schools in the world,” Hlatshwako said. “The fact that those two things came together quite beautifully, I just knew in my heart that’s where I was meant to go.”

Home again

Hlatshwako hasn’t been back to Carolina or even the U.S. since receiving the Rhodes, but it will feel like home when she returns in just a few days. “A PhD is such a big commitment. It’s a five-year-long project,” she said. “So going back to a place where I have a sense of community and professors and mentors who have already supported me — it was a no-brainer, really.”

Professionally, she appreciates Carolina’s “robust research environment.” As an undergraduate, she worked in research at Gillings, with the Carolina Population Center and the Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases. “There was a vibrancy in the air when it came to research,” she recalled in a Zoom interview from Eswatini. “There were always opportunities to get plugged in as a research assistant and so many professors working on so many interesting things.”

Personally, she wants to spend time with friends again, especially her best friend, now in her second year at the UNC School of Medicine. “I’m looking forward to seeing some of my Morehead-Cain family as well,” she said. “I hope they’ll still allow me to get free coffee in their kitchen, even though I’m not an undergraduate anymore.”