Title: Focus on Thriving: Understanding and Promoting Long-Term Health for Children and Adolescents Affected by HIV

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Speaker Bio: Jillian Neary, PhD, MPH is a Research Scientist for the Global Center for the Integrated Health of Women, Adolescents, and Children (Global WACh) in the Department of Global Health at the University of Washington. She received her MPH (2016) and PhD (2023) from the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Washington. She has over a decade of experience conducting collaborative research in Kenya. Her research interests include pediatric HIV, child neurodevelopment, biological aging among children and adolescents affected by HIV, molecular epidemiology, and advanced epidemiologic methods. Dr. Neary’s research portfolio includes studies of interventions to improve pediatric HIV testing and care for adolescents with HIV, pediatric HIV viral control, early life exposures and child neurodevelopment, and telomere length among children exposed to HIV.

Title: Opportunities for implementation Science to Strengthen Health Systems for Women and Children

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Speaker Bio: Tessa Concepcion is a global health implementation scientist with a PhD from the University of Washington and an MS in Global Health from Duke University. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. She has over 10 years of experience in public and global health research, with a focus on integrating evidence-based interventions into clinical settings to optimize effectiveness, scalability, and long-term sustainability. Her work spans pediatric surgery, mental health, HIV/STI prevention in pregnancy, and pediatric cancer across diverse global contexts. Methodologically, Tessa has expertise in mixed methods research, including the design and analysis of discrete choice experiments, latent class and longitudinal modeling, interrupted time series, and qualitative methods. She also has extensive experience in implementation science frameworks, intervention adaptation, and real-world program evaluation. Her research aims to generate actionable evidence to support the delivery and scale-up of high-impact interventions for women and children in low-resource settings. 

Title: Scalable Interventions to Improve Global Child Health and Development Over the Life Course

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Speaker Bio: Helen Pitchik, PhD, MSc, is a postdoctoral scholar in the Division of Epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health. Dr. Pitchik uses methods from epidemiology and implementation science to advance effective, sustainable, and scalable interventions that invest in local capacity to improve maternal and child health and development in low-resource settings globally. She has expertise in the design, implementation, and analysis of randomized controlled trials, quasi-experimental studies, and longitudinal cohorts. She has worked for a public health organization in New Delhi, India, and has extensive experience leading field-based studies in Bangladesh, India, Tanzania, and Kenya. Her work has been supported by multiple grants including most recently an NIH NICHD K99/R00 Career Development award. She holds a PhD in Epidemiology from UC Berkeley School of Public Health, a MSc in Global Health and Populations from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and an AB in Neurobiology from Harvard College.

Title: Small Beginnings to Big Impacts: Nutrition and the Microbiome Across the Pregnancy-Birth-Lactation Continuum

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Speaker Bio: Unmesha is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Global Alliance for Infant and Maternal Health Research (Global AIM) at Brown University in Providence, RI. She obtained her doctorate in epidemiology from the University of Washington, where she conducted cluster randomized controlled trials on HIV self-testing in Kenya. At Brown, she is currently expanding her methodological expertise in metabolomics and metagenomics using data from a pregnancy-birth cohort in Ethiopia. Born in India and raised in Thailand, Unmesha brings a global perspective to her work, informed by nearly 16 years of experience in U.S.-based research settings. Her research centers on applying rigorous epidemiological and implementation science methods to evaluate and scale interventions that improve maternal and infant health in low-resource settings. Her goal is to generate actionable evidence to optimize care delivery and reduce global health disparities. Outside of work, she enjoys reading fantasy, romance, and thriller novels, experimenting with new recipes, checking out new food places, and going on relatively easy hikes.