Students win prizes in COVID-19 vaccine awareness contest

The UIC Center for Clinical and Translational Science has announced the winners of the COVID-19 Vaccine Awareness Campaign contest.

The grand prize of $400 went to the Social Media Video for Chicago Youth. The winning students include:

• Terrice Randolph, UIC School of Public Health
• Yashodha Narayanan, UIC College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
• Vanessa Marquina, UIC College of Applied Health Sciences
• Folasade Odeniyi, UIC College of Medicine

Empowering Chicago’s youth to become community health advocates can be an efficient way to disseminate public health messages, Randolph said.

“Youth can serve as trusted messengers to encourage family, friends, and community members to get vaccinated,” Randolph said.

“My featured peers and I serve as program coordinators for the UI Health Urban Health Club (UHC), a youth-serving health career program housed under the Urban Health Program, we felt that leading by example for the youth could positively influence others into getting vaccinated.”

“My team and I initially started to collect video and images of UHC coordinators receiving the vaccine in order to share with our UHC high school students via social media; however, when we learned about the contest, we were excited to create something much better,” Marquina added.

The team was not only able to reach UIC’s community, but their work also was recently featured as part of the White House COVID-19 College Challenge — which UIC sign on to — during a presentation by Dr. Anthony Fauci, NIAID director and the chief medical advisor to the president.

All materials developed from winning participants are available on the CCTS website.

“[Website visitors can] grab, share, print and post what they resonate with amongst their communities and better arm them to help the people they serve as we all try to get over this herd immunity challenge,” said Lauren Rieger, associate director of outreach and engagement for CCTS.