#  GHELI Intern Awarded General Education Prize 

 





May 21, 2024

 

 

     ![Ashton Body.](/sites/g/files/omnuum10866/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-09/20240423_GHELI_GE1063-stdt-wkshp_082.jpg?itok=nth_xZGd) 

 



 

The Global Health Education and Learning Incubator (GHELI) sincerely congratulates Ashton Body, a Spring 2024 Harvard College graduate who was recently among five students awarded with Harvard College’s new [General Education Prize](https://gened.college.harvard.edu/student-prize/). The award invites Harvard undergraduates to reflect on how one or more General Education courses have transformed their perspective and approach to the world’s problems.

In her [reflection](https://gened.college.harvard.edu/directory/ashton-body-24/), Body chose to write about [*Bluey’s Big Worries*](/gallery/bluey%E2%80%99s-big-worries), the picture book she authored and illustrated for Gen Ed 1063 *World Health: Challenges and Opportunities*, taught by faculty director [Sue J. Goldie](/people/sue-j-goldie-md-mph). For the course’s final project, students were charged with creating a “real world” product intended to tackle a global health problem of the student’s choice.

*Bluey’s Big Worries* tells the story of an anxious fish named Bluey and how he is able to work through his fears with the help of his mother and a new coping strategy. Through creating the book, Body aimed to address rising rates of child anxiety—a topic which Body is particularly passionate about, having seen the effects of childhood anxiety at the afterschool program where she worked.

“This project transformed the way I see change-making,” writes Body. “Rather than big problems necessitating paralyzingly big solutions, I learned that sometimes the simplest ideas … can be special, fun, *and* impactful.”

Since taking the course in Spring 2022, Body has been working closely with the Incubator and Professor Goldie to develop *Bluey’s Big Worries* into a series of children’s books with accompanying resources and open access materials to raise awareness for children’s mental health and provide tools to address it. “With the support of Professor Goldie and the GHELI team, what started as a creative final project meant to add some color and liveliness to my finals, has been completely transformed into a resource that combines my passions for art, young people, and mental health in an impactful way and has shown me the power of radical imagination and dreaming,” Body writes.

Body and fellow undergraduate student Aimee Ramirez have also worked with the Incubator to design and facilitate [student workshops](/news/learning-doing-student-workshops) that have helped other students taking Gen Ed 1063 experiment with a wide variety of project mediums and how to best communicate their chosen health problem.

“Ashton’s work over the last year exemplifies the meaningful culminating experience I envisioned when designing Gen Ed 1063—even beyond the actual product, to leave the class inspired to engage in the world, to motivate change, and to inspire action. For a teacher, there is no greater gratification than to watch such a talented student embark on that journey,” said Goldie.

As a final reflection, Body encourages students to take a chance on something new. That, she said, is one of the strengths of the General Education program—it gives students the space to explore their interests and find new ones. “Don’t be afraid to try something new,” she said. “It can blossom into something you never see coming.”

Ashton Body is a senior in Eliot House at Harvard College, studying Social Anthropology with a secondary in Global Health and Health Policy. She is passionate about the intersection between the molecular and social levels of health and disease, striving to connect social determinants to their long-term biological effects through the lens of medical anthropology. Ashton recently submitted her senior thesis related to pharmaceutical pricing and drug development patent policy with hopes to better understand the drug accessibility crisis in the United States (*“Diabetes Shouldn’t Be a Death Sentence”: An Anthropology of the Patenting (and Enclosure) of Insulin)*. Additionally, Ashton loves to illustrate and hopes to combine her love of science and art together to make medicine feel more accessible through children’s books.



 

 

 



 

 

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