Allyson Pinkhover doesn’t rest on her laurels. As the director of substance use services at the Brockton Neighborhood Health Center in Massachusetts, she oversees substance use, re-entry and homelessness programs and helps the center strengthen its harm reduction approach. She’s also chair of the board of health in the town of Holbrook, an elected position she sought after the COVID-19 pandemic underscored its importance. In that role, she’s ensured opioid abatement funds are spent responsibly and pushed her department to modernize its public health offerings. And if that weren’t enough, she’s also a doctoral candidate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, concentrating in health equity and social justice. She expects to defend her dissertation this year, on the role that chemical analysis of drugs can play in improving the health of people who use drugs. It’s a dizzying array of assignments and responsibilities but one Pinkhover handles with grace, always insistent on raising up those around her, particularly when society tends to push them down. It helps, she says, that her time at Drexel’s Dana and David Dornsife School of Public Health instilled in her values-based priorities.

In addition to the foundational hard skills she learned during her master’s in public health, she learned about the human-centered side of health care, including time volunteering at the Eliza Shirley House, an emergency shelter in Philadelphia. That opportunity taught her “to interact with the community and work with people, as opposed to working at them.” She’s carried that mindset into a career she says is equal parts gratifying and exhausting. Working with people who use drugs and those experiencing homelessness can be challenging, she says, but it allows her to sharpen her focus on health as a human right — and to fight for those often excluded from conversations about the health care system. “If there’s an opportunity to do right by people who are typically left out of local policy or services, that’s always highly motivating to me,” she says.