Service has shaped every chapter of Maj. Chase Aycock’s career, from his upbringing in a small west Texas town to his decade as an Air Force health psychologist. Now, as he completes his Master of Public Health degree through the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, he will expand his impact from individual patient care to population-level health.
Aycock’s interest in helping others began early. He watched his parents devote countless hours to strengthening their community in Lorenzo, Texas. “Seeing how much they valued service and how they treated people shaped what I came to care about,” he said.
Psychology became his path to do the same for others. After earning his doctorate in clinical psychology from Wheaton College, he commissioned into the Air Force through a health care professions scholarship and specialized in clinical health psychology, which blends behavioral health, physical health and military lifestyle factors.
Over 10 years of service, he cared for airmen across the globe, including during two seven-month deployments to the Middle East. In one of his deployments, he was the only behavioral health provider for more than 4,000 service members spread across multiple installations. On another, he led the clinic on a base of 10,000 people during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The strain on the community was immense, and the need for care far exceeded what any one provider could deliver.
“It became clear that you cannot reduce the burden of illness and meet the needs of a whole community by focusing only on individual treatment,” he said. “I wanted to move upstream and prevent problems rather than treat them after they had already taken hold.”
That realization drew him toward public health. During his postdoctoral fellowship, he collaborated with epidemiologists and statisticians on research on critical health behaviors, like alcohol, tobacco and sleep, involving tens of thousands of airmen, which opened his eyes to the power of population-level methods. To gain the training he needed, he enrolled in the online MPH@UNC program, choosing the applied epidemiology concentration.
(Submitted photo)
Aycock directly applied the skills he was learning to his work at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. He developed a health surveillance program for the military training instructors who prepare all incoming Air Force trainees, identifying predictors of sleep disruption, stress and burnout. The findings informed improvements to schedules, support structures and training practices that affected both instructors and the 35,000 recruits they lead each year. “The MPH equipped me to work at the systems level, using data, policy and prevention to have a broader and more scalable impact,” he said.
His motivation remains rooted in what he witnessed across a decade of service. “It has truly been an honor to serve in the Air Force alongside the people I’m here to help,” he said. “You walk alongside people who are facing separation from their families, the stresses of deployment, and sometimes real danger. Knowing what they carry motivates me to be as helpful as I can for the military community and for any community I serve.”
After leaving active duty, Aycock hopes to train future psychologists in both clinical care and population health as a faculty member at a major research university. He will focus on community-engaged research to improve health behaviors and prevent chronic illness.
He hopes to bridge the worlds of psychology and public health to better serve communities facing complex challenges. “There is so much suffering that could be prevented if systems were designed with people’s needs in mind,” he said. “My goal is to make sure the work I do makes life better for as many people as possible.”
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