Title: Improving Early Child Health and Development in Low-resource Settings: Experiences in Intervention Design, Delivery, Evaluation, and Scale-up

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Speaker Bio: Adrianne “Katrina” Nelson | Dr. Katrina Nelson specializes in the design, implementation, and evaluation of early child health and development interventions in low-resource settings. She holds a PhD from the Department of Social, Behavioral, and Population Sciences at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and an MPH and MSc from the European Europubhealth program. Her Fulbright-funded dissertation research examines how the Nurturing Care Framework applies to young children with adolescent mothers in the Dominican Republic.

Dr. Nelson has nine years’ research experience at Partners In Health field sites in Peru, Siberia, Lesotho, and on Navajo Nation. In Peru, she was co-Principal Investigator for two community-based early child development “proof-of-concept” studies funded by Grand Challenges Canada, entitled, “CASITA” and “The Universal Baby Project”. She successfully scaled-up CASITA to 3,000 children through local government partnerships, and then adapted it to a rural maternal health clinic in Lesotho. She has contributed to NIH-funded R01 effectiveness trials involving tuberculosis in Russia, HIV/AIDS in Peru, and the mental health of Latina women in King County, WA. Dr. Nelson is passionate about social justice and health equity and uses community-based participatory research, implementation science, and capacity building tools to generate and sustain impactful interventions for vulnerable populations. 

Title: Childhood Wasting: A Critical Barrier to Global Health Equity

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Speaker Bio: Dr. Kirk Tickell is a health researcher focused on optimizing the management of children with wasting and improving discharge care for children leaving hospital. He completed medical training at Imperial College London, and practiced in the United Kingdom, Tanzania and South Africa before moving to the University of Washington (UW) to complete a PhD. Over the last 10 years he has worked with colleagues at the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) and the UW to build an increasingly equitable research platform for conducting clinic and community-based child health research. Together, this partnership has completed multiple high impact projects which have directly informed WHO policy and the practices of multinational non-governmental organizations (NGO). Kirk is currently the principal investigator of research studies funded by NIH, BMGF, The Thrasher Research Foundation, the WHO, and the UW. In addition to being an Acting Assistant Professor in the UW’s Department of Global Health, Kirk is a technical advisor on child health and nutrition to Sukarya, a large Indian NGO, and is a member of the WHO’s technical advisory group for the management of childhood wasting. 

Title: Early life gut microbiome and immunity in infants HIV exposed but uninfected 

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Speaker Bio: Dr. Nyangahu completed his PhD in Immunology at the University of Cape Town where he studied the influence of the maternal microbiota during pregnancy or nursing on infant microbiota and immunity. He did his postdoctoral fellowship at Seattle Children’s Research Institute in Dr. Heather Jaspan’s lab. Here, he studied the influence of early life gut microbiota in infants exposed to HIV on vaccine response. Dr. Nyangahu performs translational research testing associations between the microbiome and immune phenotypes of interest in humans and performing studies in mice to understand causation. His current research aims at understanding the link between early life gut microbiota and inflammation, growth, and immunity to enteric pathogens. He is also interested in the interplay between enteric bacteriome and virome.