In May 2014, the Department of Global Health awarded fellowships to 19 outstanding students and medical residents. With support from one of these five programs they will travel to 10 countries to work on wide variety of projects addressing issues such as childhood cancer, TB, and mental health. The 2014-2015 fellowship recipients are listed below.

For more information on the fellowships, visit the Global Health Resource Center's Funding and Fieldwork page.

Pulitzer International Reporting Fellowship in Global Health

Paul Nevin, MPHc – Global Health, School of Public Health

Paul’s diverse experience ranges from researching urogenital schistosomiasis in rural Ghana to leading multiday vacations for adults with developmental disabilities. He has also worked in project management for various nongovernmental organizations in Ethiopia, Ecuador, and Costa Rica. Paul is interested in social, cultural, and environmental determinants of health and looks forward to exploring the underlying structural causes of health inequity in Kenya in partnership with a Communications Department student.

Stergachis Endowed Fellowship for International Exchange

Suzanne McGoldrick, MD, MPHc – Global Health, School of Public Health

While born in Ireland, the majority of Suzanne's childhood was spent in Germany, where she completed her Medical School training at the Albert Ludwig University, Freiburg. Her interest in Pediatric Cancers led her to do her pediatric residency at Duke University in North Carolina and her Pediatric Oncology Fellowship at the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Hospital. With the generous Stergachis Fellowship award she plans to travel to Kampala, Uganda, and spend a months learning more about the problems faced by pathologist and clinicians involved in the care of children with cancer. Specifically my project will focus on the diagnostic issues surrounding Burkitt Lymphoma, the most common childhood cancer in many countries in Africa.

George Povey Social Justice and Activism in Global Health Fellowship

Jessica Dyer, MPHc – Global Health, School of Public Health

Spending time in the field is important to Jessica and over the past seven years, her work has taken her to Uganda (2007-2009) where I served as a community health and education volunteer in the United States Peace Corps. She has also worked extensively in Sierra Leone and Vietnam, where she worked in collaboration with public sector health systems to design and implement nationwide public health interventions preventing disability. With this award, she will be working with women in Timor-Leste to conduct qualitative research exploring and understanding their experiences using Liga Inan. Liga Inan is a mobile health (mHealth) technology providing pregnant women with regular text messages to promote healthy behaviors during their pregnancy, delivery, and postpartum periods, and is the first of its kind in Timor-Leste.

Thomas Francis, Jr., Global Health Fellowship

Adrian Hughes, PharmDc – School of Pharmacy

After starting her career in HIV vaccine research, Adrian pursued pharmacy as a unique opportunity to merge her love of biochemistry and molecular biology with direct patient care. A traveler since her first passport landed in her hands, she attended an exploration seminar in India through the School of Nursing and found herself at home, overwhelmed by a passion for global health. Her project seeks to determine the feasibility of establishing a pregnancy-exposure registry for women on anti-retroviral therapy in Namibia, a critical way to gather data on the safety of these important and effective medications in a vulnerable population. She seeks to develop her skills in qualitative research through this fellowship, with the ultimate goal of working globally to promote the unique skills contained in the profession of pharmacy to improve the safe and effective use of medications worldwide.  

Stephanie Kovacs, MPH, PhDc – Epidemiology, School of Public Health

 Stephanie worked for two years as a research fellow with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Tanzania focusing primarily on prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV and maternal and child health.  Her research interests focus on infectious disease and phamacovigillance surveillance specifically in low and middle income countries. Her dissertation combines these interests to study the safety of antimalarial drugs in pregnancy. Stephanie will be traveling to Liverpool, United Kingdom to collaborate with the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and the Malaria in Pregnancy Consortium (MiPc). During her stay in Liverpool, she will be working intensely with the data management team of the MiPc to combine data from eight randomized clinical trials and a multi-site cohort study in order to assess the safety of antimalarial drugs.

Diana Marangu, MPHc – Global Health, School of Public Health

Diana is a pediatrician and tutorial fellow in the Department of Pediatrics and Child Health at the University of Nairobi. Her passion lies in preventive respiratory health, an area in which she hopes to be a global leader in the future. The fellowship will facilitate her proposed research on exploring the barriers, facilitators and potential solutions to TB contact investigation in Nairobi County in Kenya. The findings in this formative research will inform the development of implementation tools used to optimize TB contact investigation in this context and in areas with similar opportunities and challenges.

Manuela Raunig-Berhó, MPHc – Global Health, School of Public Health

Manuela earned her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and prior to coming to UW worked as a Behavioral Health Care Coordinator with Sea Mar Community Health Center. The research project funded by the Thomas Francis, Jr. Fellowship will provide her with experience in conducting a baseline assessment regarding mental health needs, and will further provide experience in key research methodologies needed to study the ways in which sociocultural contexts impact perceptions of mental health care. This work will be valuable in relation to her long-term goal of improving access to mental health treatment in global settings.

Andrew Secor, MPHc – Global Health, School of Public Health

Andrew earned his Bachelor’s degree in International Development from Brown University. Most recently, he served in the U.S. Peace Corps as a Program Development Officer for a community-based organization in the Limpopo district of South Africa. He has also worked in Uganda, Rwanda, and Nepal. His areas of interest include: access to care, infectious diseases, and marginalized populations. The Thomas Francis, Jr. Global Health Fellowship will enable him to travel to Mtwapa, Kenya to assist in the implementation of an intervention to increase ART adherence among men who have sex with men (MSM) in the area. He will also be able to develop his thesis – a study of the associations between HIV status and psychosocial markers in Kenyan MSM.   

Yu Yu, MPHc – Global Health, School of Public Health

During the past 7 years, Yu Yu has been actively engaged in promoting mental health as a public health student in Central South university of China. With 7 years of higher learning and quality hands-on experience in Public Health in China, she is now ready to expand her research interest to other parts of the world. Her main work for this project includes investigating the risk factors and outcomes of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) especially mental illness in rural South Asian populations and their responses to illness and health care decision-making for the Household Chronic Disease Risk Factor (CDRF) study, and working with the China India Mental Health Alliance on a paper--- “Rethinking suicide: lessons from China and India”.

Global Opportunities (GO) Health Fellowship

Sara Diedrich, MPHc – Nutritional Sciences, School of Public Health 

While earning a BA in Biology at St. Olaf College Sara had the opportunity to study and volunteer in Europe, Northern Africa, Asia and Central America. She has been interested in Nutritional Sciences for many years, but became especially interested in Global Health Nutrition after traveling to Nicaragua with a team of researchers from the University of Minnesota to assist with a community health assessment and cervical cancer screening project. She is grateful for this GO Health Fellowship, which will give her the opportunity to combine her interests in community nutrition and education as she carries out a health literacy and nutritional assessment of school aged children in the Peruvian district of Puente Piedra. With the help of Dr. Joseph Zunt at UW and his team at the San Marcos University in Lima, she hopes to use the results of this research to develop an education program to improve the nutritional health of children in Puente Piedra.

Chris Hearne, DNPc (Nursing) – School of Nursing

Chris' professional background is as a registered nurse working in mental health. He is currently in his first year of the doctoral adult-gerontology nurse practitioner program at the University of Washington School of Nursing. He has experience working in healthcare in developing countries, including projects in Tanzania and China. Chris' GO Health Fellowship will be in Kenya in summer 2014. His project will be focused on developing capacity in a small rural health clinic in a Maasai community. The end goal is for this clinic to have the certification to distribute ART and TB medications, so that the local population has access to treatment and prevention for these illnesses. His personal goals for the fellowship are to contribute meaningfully to the goals of the clinic and to develop my professional knowledge and skills surrounding public health capacity building, HIV/TB prevention and treatment, as well as cultural competency.

Rebekah Heckmann, MD, 3rd Year Medical Resident – Div. of Emergency Medicine, School of Medicine

Rebekah has worked in the field of international public health for over ten years and have been the primary investigator for research projects conducted in the Republic of Korea and Ecuador. Completion of this project would serve as the capstone research project of her residency, will allow her to refine her research interests prior to making final global health fellowship decisions, and would provide for the development of a valuable network of collaborators with whom she can continue to work during her fellowship years. Most importantly, this study will improve patient care by characterizing the case mix of patient presentations in a major Kenyan ED. Additionally, this project will introduce simulation education into the Kenyan health care system based upon local health needs and will provide useful information when determining whether this type of education is applicable to other EDs in the region.

Nicole Ide, MPHc – , Global Health, School of Public Health

Prior to her graduate studies, Nicole received a BA in Political Science/International Affairs from Seattle Pacific University.  With the assistance of the GO Health Fellowship, Nicole will travel to Nepal to implement a validation study of the SmartVA verbal autopsy tool developed by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. She will work alongside the Dhulikhel Heart Study, which is currently seeking out a method to measure and track mortality. Additionally, she will train local health workers at Dhulikhel Hospital and coordinators/interviewers for the Dhulikhel Heart Study to use the tool in their health surveillance systems. Partnering with the Dhulikhel Heart Study will provide Nicole with a deeper insight into her primary interest within global health, that is, measuring and responding to the non-communicable disease burden in a low resource setting.

Darya Kizub, MD, – 1st Year Medical Resident, School of Medicine

Darya first became interested in global health while studying public health and medicine at the Johns Hopkins University. After participating in research related to HIV and tuberculosis in Russia and Morocco, she has continued to learn about the intersection of medicine and culture/tradition by providing care to patients at the International Medicine Clinic at Harborview Hospital. The GO Health Fellowship will give her the opportunity to travel to Kisumu, Kenya to work with Dr. Susan Graham at UW and the Nyanza Reproductive Health Society (NRHS) on a project that will provide antiretroviral treatment to 250 HIV-positive men who have sex with men (MSM) in an attempt to prevent HIV transmission to their partners. The program will also aim to reach and retain 750 HIV-negative MSM in a year-long HIV prevention program. If successful, the program could be expanded to other locations in Kenya and Africa. I hope to use my experience as a clinician and public health researcher to help the NRHS with program implementation and evaluation.

Abigail Korn, MPHc – Global Health, School of Public Health

Abi holds a BA in Latin American Studies from Washington University in St. Louis, and her research has focused on sexual and reproductive health as well as indigenous people’s access to health care. This summer, Abi is looking forward to working in Guatemala with PRONTO International, an organization committed to reducing maternal and neonatal mortality. She will be conducting birth observations to collect baseline data on teamwork and clinical practice in northwestern Guatemala, an impoverished, largely rural, and indigenous area known as “the corridor of death” for their extremely high maternal mortality ratios. 

Daisy Krakowiak, PhDc – Epidemiology, School of Public Health

Daisy Krakowiak earned her MPH and a graduate certificate in Global Health from the University of Utah in 2010. She is working with her mentor, Dr. Carey Farquhar, on a randomized clinical trial of home-based education and HIV testing of partners of pregnant women in Western Kenya (The HOPE Study). In this trial, community health workers perform home visits with pregnant couples and cover educational topics such as HIV prevention and treatment, the importance of facility delivery, exclusive breastfeeding, and postpartum family planning, as well as conduct couple HIV counseling and testing. Daisy is developing a qualitative interview to learn what aspects of the home-based health education and HIV testing intervention were effective from a user perspective. This information will help in improving the intervention for potential nationwide roll-out if the intervention is found to be acceptable, effective and cost-effective.  She is excited and thankful for this hands-on opportunity to further her passion and research experience in global health.

David Phillips, PhDc – Global Health, School of Public Health

David Phillips is a native Seattleite. He holds a research position at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. With experience in data analysis, and education in statistics and study design, David hopes to use his quantitative disposition to improve public health policies and interventions with a focus on population-level health and equity, particularly child health. David’s recent research has focused on enhancing the utility of data on causes of death, measuring smoking cessation at a country level and producing novel models for the Global Burden of Disease Study using advanced statistical techniques, machine learning and mathematical optimization. David loves international travel, seafood and camping trips with his fiancé and dog.

Aradhana Thapa, MPHc – Global Health, School of Public Health

Before this, Aradhana worked with communities in Nepal for improving health care system and rehabilitation of children with disabilities. She is deeply grateful for the financial support of Global Opportunities (GO) Health Fellowship program. This will assist her in completion of her research work in Nepal that will explore the health worker’s perspective on provision of family planning counselling among post-abortion clients. She is working under supervision and support of faculty at the UW, Annette Fitzpatrick, and with the Program Director at the Family Planning Association of Nepal. This project will help the organization to improve the delivery of family planning contraception among post abortion clients and will help Aradhana develop research skills. As a female with cultural roots in Nepal, her cultural knowledge, experience, public health skills and zeal to contribute in efforts to improve the health in her country will be beneficial to the organization.

Bradley Wagenaar, PhDc – Epidemiology, School of Public Health

Bradley came to UW after finishing Master’s level training at Emory, with a focus on the epidemiology of depression and suicide in rural Haiti. He is a returned Peace Corps Volunteer from Northern Cameroon. He is currently working with Health Alliance International to support strengthening integrated primary health care in Mozambique. He will use the GO fellowship to support dissertation activities to assess the availability of psychotropic medications, to conduct chart reviews to determine current diagnosis and treatment patterns for mental disorders, and to survey health-facility staff around perceptions, knowledge, and current practices for common mental disorders in Sofala Province, Mozambique.