Manitoban hopes Rhodes Scholarship can help her save lives

Amy Mann is one of the unlucky teenagers whose Grade 12 year was disrupted by COVID-19, over and over and over again.

Mann, now a 21-year-old, recalled feeling incredibly frustrated about Manitoba public health officials’ unclear explanations related to moving students in and out of remote learning in 2020-21.

“I didn’t understand why schools were staying closed when the evidence suggested there was no or limited transmission,” she told the Free Press.

“And bars were open — that really upset me.”

Five years later, the high-achiever is preparing to pack her bags for the U.K. to study the intersection of statistics, public health and the social sciences on a prestigious international scholarship.

Mann was named a 2025 Rhodes Scholar, and she’s the only born-and-raised Manitoban in the incoming cohort.

The Class of 2025 encompasses just over 100 recipients who are slated to pursue fully funded graduate studies at the University of Oxford.

The group represents 29 nationalities and 73 post-secondary institutes, including the University of Toronto.

Mann enrolled in U of T after graduating from both the Pembina Trails School Division and University of Winnipeg Collegiate — the downtown campus on which she learned to practise social distancing.

The young statistician said she spent much of her high school career doing homework at public libraries in her hometown.

“People definitely underestimate Manitoba. I’m proud to be from here,” said the U of T alum who returned to Winnipeg over the summer to spend time with her family after completing a statistics-related program (her official degree is a bachelor of science).

Mann originally entered university with a plan to become a physicist, but she said she quickly realized her love of sorting and coding data could assist with evidence-based decision-making to improve the lives of others.

She has been a part of research teams that have studied how climate change will affect malaria and the fallout of incomplete record-keeping — also known as “garbage-coded deaths” — in health care and government-run databases.

“When we don’t specify what exactly (a patient) died of, it hampers us from understanding epidemics and responding to them,” Mann said.

The 21-year-old academic called the worldwide phenomenon that is “bias in mortality data,” a special research interest of hers because it is a literal life-or-death issue.

Mann likened public health statisticians to advocates who have “a kind of moral responsibility” because they analyze datasets to uncover oddities and inequities.

Oftentimes, they expose issues that negatively affect the most marginalized patients in a society, she said. As far as she is concerned, one of the biggest problems in 2025 is that decision makers care most about the loudest of critics and they are typically privileged as they know how to speak up and advocate for themselves.

The Rhodes Scholar said that growing up in a province that continues to grapple with the health consequences of colonialism and intergenerational trauma, including the respective meth and opioid crises, has influenced her greatly.

The University of Manitoba’s Natalie Riediger supervised one of her undergraduate research projects.

Riediger, an associate professor of food and human nutritional sciences, was one of Mann’s six required references for her application. She described the up-and-coming researcher as an “excellent student.”

Mann said her studious nature is what made her so irritated about COVID-19-related classroom closures.

“Having lived through (a pandemic) makes me a lot more aware of the importance of community input and the importance of really thinking about social sciences questions in public health,” she said.

Citing that experience and her undergraduate studies, she said the best public health response to any given issue is “the response that people are OK with and willing to follow.”

Mann noted the recent surge in measles, as well as the rise of vaccine hesitancy in Manitoba and outside the Prairies, has sparked her interest.

The problem is not that people do not trust science, she said. “They don’t trust scientific institutions, and there’s a real reason for that.”

While noting that public health officials were under immense pressure during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the 21-year-old said top-down, “this is how it is” attitudes damaged many citizens’ trust in the discipline.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca