Alumnae Spotlight
Nicole Kolm-Valdivia ‘06
As a senior biology major at College of Saint Mary, Nicole Kolm-Valdivia ‘06 was considering her next step when she realized medical school might not be the answer. “I started to think that individual patient care was not as appealing to me as a population health perspective,” Nicole said.
That led the central Nebraska native to graduate school at the University of Toledo in Ohio to earn her Master of Public Health. “This was, of course, before the pandemic. Back then, public health wasn’t as widely known,” she said.
During graduate school, Nicole interned with Safe Kids Greater Toledo in pediatric injury prevention. Her role included car seat checks, handing out smoke detectors and bike safety presentations.
“I just loved it,” Nicole said.
The internship led to a job as a pediatric injury prevention specialist and fire safety grant coordinator. She worked closely with area fire departments for fire safety presentations in schools.
Two years later, Nicole began working on her Doctor of Philosophy in Health Education. Her graduate assistantship included teaching health to the students at a high school for teen moms in Toledo.
Nicole also coordinated data collection for the evaluation for an Office of Population Affairs Adolescent Family Life Grant, which helped provide wrap-around services for teen moms. She was later hired at the school as the coordinator of student services. Her role included securing grant funding, recruitment and retention.
“We served those with the highest needs,” Nicole said. “The county we were in had one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the state of Ohio. We had a lot of students.”
Nicole said the experience at the school gave her empathy and compassion that guides her work in public health today. “Working at a high-need inner-city school was a good experience because it gave me a public health perspective about how to ensure that everyone in a population is able to achieve their best health,” she said.
In 2012, Nicole began working for the Iowa Department of Public Health in Des Moines, first as the HIV prevention evaluation coordinator and later as the data program manager overseeing the surveillance and epidemiology for HIV and Hepatitis C.
Today, Nicole is the director of professional programs and interim assistant dean for academic affairs for the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s College of Public Health. She also teaches a planning and evaluation class.
“Some of my best instructors were those who had real-life experience,” Nicole said. “I have a lot of experience in evaluation and I use those examples in almost everything I teach. I can provide real life examples to what we’re learning in the textbook. Sometimes it’s even, ‘Here’s what the textbook says, but in real life, it’s probably not going to look that way, it’s probably going to happen this way.’”
Not long after taking on her new role at UNMC, the U.S. was hit with the coronavirus pandemic. Nicole helped support her students, many of whom worked long hours for public health departments.
Nicole said that as a result of the pandemic, public health professionals and educators are now in a position to think about lessons learned. “We’re looking at our curriculum to include some critical skills that our students need to have,” she said. “Communication is a big one. There were many communication failures within public health during the pandemic.”
Nicole said the commitment to service and justice she learned at College of Saint Mary had helped her throughout her career. “I believe that College of Saint Mary was the impetus for my desire to help improve health equity among communities and make sure everyone has the tools they need to be the healthiest they can be,” she said.
