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Current Scholars - Biographies
2008 Global Health Clinical Scholars Joshua Bress Pediatrics
Joshua became interested in Global Health while working for Nashville CARES, a non-profit community AIDS organization in Nashville TN. While working for CARES, Joshua completed a 1700 mile on foot trek from the Mexican border up the entire length of California to help jump start the Nashville AIDS Walk. This walk opened doors to additional experiences and as a fourth year medical student, he worked both domestically on the Apache Reservation in Whiteriver, Arizona and abroad at La Universidad de Cayetano Heredia in Lima, Peru, home to the Gorgas course in tropical medicine. He hopes to continue to learn more about the laboratory diagnosis of infectious diseases and envisions a career that involves medical student education as a principal element.
Yogita was born and raised in India where after graduating from dental school she was very actively involved in volunteering at local schools (in low-income neighborhoods), and orphanages. She also served as a dentist on a medical team that adopted slums around the capital city of New Delhi, to treat the residents. She became interested in research, public health and health disparities and came to the United States to get her Masters in Dental Public Health from the University of Iowa. She has worked with the Centers to Address Disparities in Oral Health at UCSF prior to starting her Pediatric Dentistry residency. With her advanced training in public health, pediatric dentistry and global health she remains committed to improve the oral health status and quality of life of children residing in underserved communities through volunteerism, training and education of the caretakers in the communities.
Tierney Caselli Tierney’s attraction to a career in global mental health arose through the convergence longstanding interests in HIV education and prevention, the psychiatric sequelae of HIV disease, and her travels to East Africa. Starting in high school Tierney became involved in local and academic efforts to improve AIDS awareness and understand the psychosocial aspects of the disease. In medical school, while considering a career in obstetrics and gynecology, she conducted infectious disease research and found that the behavioral and psychosocial factors contributing to the spread of disease were most compelling. This discovery ultimately led to residency in psychiatry. During residency training Tierney has continued to gain expertise in the area of HIV and psychiatric illness. In addition, she has spent time in East Africa and became increasingly aware of the lack of mental health resources, as well as the limited psychiatric research and training that exist in the developing world. Last year she traveled to Uganda to develop a research topic in HIV and psychiatry and began the process of designing a one month international clinical elective in psychiatry through Makerere University School of Medicine. She plans to return to Africa this year to continue her development as educator and clinical researcher with expertise in the areas of global mental health and HIV related psychiatric disorders.
During his fourth year in medical school, Jack helped to plan and organize a trip to the North Atlantic Autonomous Region of Nicaragua (RAAN) with seven of his classmates at Tufts University School of Medicine. In collboration with the NGO Bridges to Community and MINSA ( Nicaragua's National Health Ministry) the Tufts' Team provided urgent care services to four rural communities, and conducted community needs assessments in order to improve health care access to the rural population in the RAAN. Via the GHCSP, Jack hopes to build skills to improve health care delivery to marginalized and underserved populations, both at home and abroad.
Megan Daw Megan became interested in global health during her MPH program at UNC. There she participated in the Global Health certificate program and formulated her Master’s Thesis on a reproductive health program in rural Honduras. She performed a program evaluation on the syndromic management of STIs of the Honduran Health Alliance. This program offered general reproductive health education, family planning, and cervical cancer screening to women living in six rural communities in southern Honduras. While in Honduras she participated in Charlas for the local communities as well as clinical work in women’s health at a central health outpost. She is currently working on expanding a cervical cancer screening program in Kisumu, Kenya for HIV positive women and ultimately hopes to work both clinically and in public health.
Karen’s interest in global health began while she was working for the Institute for Central American Development Studies in Costa Rica. While working for this unique study abroad program, she arranged internships for students throughout Central America and eventually, started a summer program for pre-med and public health students. While she loved her job, she was most fascinated by the innovative health programs of the local NGOs and she was inspired by the global response to Hurricane Mitch. She returned to the US to complete a Master’s degree in Public Health in the area of Forced Migration. She interned on an HIV project in Sierra Leone and then, spent the next few years working with post-conflict, migrant and disaster affected communities in Angola, Tibet, and Sri Lanka. Reviving her passion for working with HIV infected and affected populations, she then spent some time working on the national ARV roll-out in the Dominican Republic before deciding to pursue nursing. During the past three years, she has volunteered regularly at Camp Laurel for HIV infected children and she has worked in Tijuana at an AIDS orphanage. In addition, she has continued her involvement in international community health programs through her work with the Gaia Foundation in Malawi. She is looking forward to graduating next year and hopes to work internationally with HIV infected and affected women and children.
David's interest in global health began in high school, after working as a community sanitation volunteer in rural Ecuador. His experience there directed his future studies, prompting him to explore international development in college and global health in graduate school. He spent a term in college working with an NGO in rural Uganda, where he served as a clinical assistant and a trainer of community health workers. After college, he moved to Turkmenistan to serve in the Peace Corps as a community health volunteer. During medical school, he completed a tropical medicine rotation in India and a pediatric HIV rotation in Lesotho. He hopes to spend his career in Africa, practicing clinical medicine and offering support to local health care institutions.
Cassis Henry Cassis has worked in global health since directly after college, when she worked for a year in Cote d’Ivoire, West Africa, on a health development project providing culturally-targeted prenatal education to rural women. In medical school, she initially volunteered and then took a year’s leave to work with Partners In Health, a non-profit health-focused non-governmental organization working in Boston (USA), Haiti, Peru, Guatemala, and the former Soviet Union. Amongst her responsibilities was research in community-based treatment for HIV and TB and the organization of a conference of global leaders in infectious disease which mobilized public health support for making ARVs and treatment for multi-drug resistant TB available in resource-poor settings. She then entered a medical anthropology graduate program where her preliminary fieldwork involved northeast Brazil, working with a community of garbage-pickers and studying mental health deinstitutionalization. After graduating from medical school, she took a year prior to residency to work in central Haiti in a small, rural town, providing both primary and HIV- and TB-focused care in outpatient and inpatient settings. During that time, she began fieldwork towards a PhD dissertation in medical anthropology, studying cultural understandings of HIV infection in Haiti, HIV-related stigma, and the effect of treatment availability on the cultural experience of stigma and of disease. She hopes to return to Haiti to continue this qualitative work and to broaden her work on stigma to include global mental health.
Sara's interest in international medicine took her to Botswana in 2004, where she worked for a local HIV/AIDS outreach organization called Holy Cross Hospice. She was one of three medical students who designed and conducted a needs assessment to determine what resources the hospice could provide for people infected with HIV who were living in the most impoverished neighborhood in Gaborone. She also worked with a local HIV/AIDS community outreach group, called Youth Health Organization (YOHO), to develop a mentorship program for local AIDS orphans. She returned to Gaborone, Botswana, during her last two months of medical school to work as a sub-intern in the female medical ward in Princess Marina Hospital, which is Botswana's largest referral hospital. After residency training, she wants to work in a developing country, likely in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on HIV clinical treatment and prevention through direct patient care as well as clinical research, community outreach, and program implementation.
Brian first became interested in global health while studying for his degree in pharmacy. Through course work in health care systems and pharmacoeconomics, Brian has developed a strong interest in health care system development. He had the opportunity to spend three weeks in Niger, where he assisted local and state governments in budgeting for health-related services. He hopes to work for the United Nations and assist developing countries in providing health care services to all of their citizens.
Joe's first experience in global health was spending 9 months working in a rural hospital in Ingwavuma, South Africa. He returned for 2 months and worked with Orphancare, an NGO, assisting in care of patients in far-flung parts of the health district. He is interested in African languages and history, and would like to return to Sub-Saharan Africa in the future to work in clinical medicine or further outreach. He is interested in parasitic diseases.
Sarah grew up wanting to work in the medical field, but it wasn’t until a college trip to the Thai-Burma border that she realized she wanted to heal not only wounds, but also communities. During her time there she met with many Burmese activists, tortured refugees, and human rights groups, where she acquired a deeper insight of the social and political situation facing the Burmese people and from there developed her passion for public health and global health. During medical school this interest broadened through women’s health and youth education projects she carried out with the local Somali refugee community and through participating in IFMSA’s International Training on Refugee Health in Peshawar, Pakistan. After her third year of medical school, Sarah took a year off to obtain her Masters in Public Health with an International Health Concentration at Harvard School of Public Health. Her thesis was on sexual violence against women and she spent a month in India living with girls rescued from sex trafficking and working with STOP, a prominent grassroots anti-trafficking NGO. She then took another year off to live in Cairo, Egypt in order to develop her Arabic language skills and better under the surrounding culture. Just before graduating from medical school she spent some more time in India with STOP and also traveled to Kashmir where she worked on educating lady health workers with CDRS, a dedicated NGO providing medical relief to the earthquake affected areas. After residency Sarah hopes to serve as a family medicine physician providing healthcare and empowering underserved populations, developing and implementing programs combating social determinants of illness, and shaping public policy to eliminate human rights violations and ensure social justice.
Amy’s interest in global health began in medical school, when she spent eight months in China learning about geriatric care in Hong Kong and Shanghai, rotating through hospitals, community based outreach centers, and nursing homes. The experience gave her first hand knowledge of the under-recognized burden of chronic disease in developing countries. At UCSF, she has appreciated the opportunity to practice cross-cultural medicine, especially with many of her immigrant Chinese patients. Amy would like to develop a career in global health that addresses the lack of resources for neurological care in underserved populations and in developing countries, with a special interest in the Asian community and Asia. She is particularly interested in education and community based models of care.
Carol Lin Carol first developed an interest in international health during medical school when she became involved in the Forum for International Health and Tropical Medicine as a first-year. She spent the following summer in Arusha, Tanzania, working with local teachers to develop a curriculum for high school students to become community educators on HIV prevention. She later spent a year as a Doris Duke Clinical Fellow in southern Malawi working with the St. Louis Nutrition Project and Project Peanut Butter in the field of pediatric malnutrition and the use of Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food, a home-based therapy for children suffering from moderate to severe malnutrition in rural areas. It was here that she solidified her desire to incorporate global health into her future career as an orthopaedic surgeon. She has a particular interest in the management of wound care and osteomyelitis, pediatric trauma, and the development of medical education curricula for rural health providers. In her rare and much apprecaited moments of free time, she enjoys the acoustic guitar, the occasional run down the embarcadero, and playing Rock Band.
Since undergraduate university, Jessica has had a keen interest in global health. She attended Oxford University for a year and completed medical anthropology studies of the birth process experienced by women in developing nations. Summer after graduating from Stanford University, she spent three months in Bihar, the poorest state in the northeast region of India. During that time she and three other university students traveled to schools in rural villages of Bihar where they completed needs assessments of the schools while subsequently teaching science and art to the children. They reported back to ASHA, an international group that supports education in India, who provided needed materials to these isolated schools. During her summer between first and second year of medical school, she completed an internship at the WHO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Here, she worked with Dr. Sandy Gove on the development of the IMAI (Integrated Management of Adult and Adolescent Illness) ethnographic protocols for rapidly delivering ARV and anti-TB treatment to patients in developing countries. Her tasks included research and evaluation of different protocols used previously in developing countries and writing the introduction of the protocol for adaptation in targeted sites. During her fourth year of medical school, Jessica spent two months in East Africa. The first of these months was spent in Kampala, Uganda. Here, she completed a clinical rotation at both Mulago Hospital in the pediatrics wards and clinics, and the PIDC (pediatric infectious disease center) where she saw children and teens with HIV. She also arranged to attend the MildMay center for HIV on the outskirts of Kampala. Her future plans are to specialize in pediatric HIV with a primary region of interest in Africa. Public health work in the form of epidemiology and prevention is where she sees herself pouring her energies alongside clinical work.
Annie became a nurse because so many of the world's poorest people suffer for lack of basic provisions for health. She believes that a well-trained global nursing workforce is crucial to fighting health disparities, because nurses are equipped to give much of the care that is missing in poor communities and are trained to regard the patient (whether an individual or a population) as the driver and sustainer of positive health change. Annie's experience with grassroots agricultural development in Central America has taught her about the potential of community-sustained programs. Her work with newly-immigrated pregnant mothers in New York, as well as free clinics in Kansas, New York, and California, has taught her that issues of global health arise in every locale. She hopes to do work building nursing capacity in the developing world.
Priya's interest in global health began while in college while working on microbicide development for women to curb the spread of HIV and STDs in resource poor settings such as sub-Saharan Africa. While in medical school she pursued her interest in international health by volunteering in an Infectious Disease Hospital in Mumbai and working with an urban NGO, SPARC, to assess health outcomes as a function of infrastructure development and slum-dweller relocation. Her interests prompted her to pursue many months of field research while completing her medical school thesis on parasite immunoepidemiology in the Peruvian Amazon. She traveled to Eritrea where she assisted physicians in a clinical capacity while learning first hand about the intricacies of rebuilding a health infrastructure in a post-conflict political environment. In addition, Priya has worked with the WHO on HIV and hepatitis epidemiology projects in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Through the Yale University World Fellows Program, Priya was able to learn more about social and economic aspects of international development. Priya's research interests include the immunology and epidemiology of emerging diseases, health care diplomacy, and finding innovative ways to bring advances in Critical Care medicine to resource poor settings.
Marcy’s interest in global health began with her undergraduate studies in Anthropology and Sociology where she developed an interest in cultural influences on maternal and child health and spent a semester in Cameroon studying infant feeding practices in the southern rainforests. After college she spent two years as Peace Corps volunteer in Mali, West Africa, working as a health educator in a rural village. She returned from Mali in 2003 and spent a year-and-a-half working in local public health and preparing for nursing school. After completing the Master’s Entry Program at UCSF, she took a year off to train and work as an obstetric nurse at San Francisco General Hospital where she continues to work part-time. She is currently working on her master’s degree in Community Health and International Nursing, and recently returned from a summer internship in Zambia where she participated in research on the non-pneumatic anti-shock garment in the management of obstetric hemorrhage. Marcy hopes to continue working as a nurse to continue in the field of global reproductive and maternal and child health.
Amanda began traveling and volunteering abroad since her undergraduate nursing education. She became interested in global health while she was in Trinidad and Guyana between her final two years of her undergraduate studies. Her travels have focused on women’s health and access to prenatal care in rural areas in Haiti, Tanzania, and Guyana. She has also traveled to Mexico with a group that focuses on social justice and the effects of globalization on resource-poor countries. She hopes to travel to Guatemala in the spring with the midwives from SFGH to learn and share with the local midwives. In the future, Amanda plans to travel often to Central America to expand her career in clinical practice and hopes to develop local training and nursing education programs. She would eventually like to develop an exchange program that allows nursing students an opportunity to expand their clinical and academic education globally.
Ramnath became interested in global health while studying abroad in South Africa as undergraduate, where he had a chance to witness the politics of the global HIV epidemic firsthand. After graduating, he spent time working with the National Slum Dwellers Federation, a housing rights organization in Mumbai, India on a University of Chicago Human Rights Internship. After his third year of medical school, he spent one year in Chennai, India at the YRG Centre for AIDS Research and Education (YRG CARE), India's largest non-governmental HIV hospital, on an NIH Fogarty-Ellison Research Fellowship in Global Health. His projects focused on adverse effects of antiretroviral therapy, domestic violence, and HIV-TB coinfection. In the future, he hopes to work on equity and access to health care in developing countries from a public health perspective.
Tara Vijayan Tara has always been interested in the experiences and narratives of immigrants and marginalized groups. She has spent time in South Africa, where she initiated a project assessing risk and knowledge of HIV prevention among sex workers. She was saddened to discover the limitations of AIDS education, as many young women knew how to protect themselves, but were limited by multiple psychological and social barriers. She developed a love of qualitative research methods and pursued several projects in medical school and eventually hopes to pursue a career involving clinical medicine and public health.
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