Environmental Health Sciences

Tamara is fueled by a desire to help others. Part of it, she says, is her upbringing on three continents. "My cosmopolitan background has instilled in me a great sense of the worth and diversity of each person."

After graduating from Barnard College in 2005 with a major in Environmental Science, Tamara headed to rural southern Mexico to work for a year in the health clinic of an orphanage caring for 600 children. It was here that she first came to understand the great benefits of being trained in both public health and medicine.

Thanks to a graduate scholarship from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, Tamara began her MPH degree as a student in the Environmental Health Sciences Department and the global health track at the Mailman School. During her first year of MPH studies she was grateful to be given the opportunity to work with Dr. Manuela Orjuela, a professor in the EHS department and a pediatric oncologist at Columbia University Medical Center. Tamara worked as the study coordinator for Dr. Orjuela’s international research on the environmental causes of non-familial retinoblastoma in children. Dr. Orjuela is an inspiring role model for Tamara, exemplifying what can be accomplished by combining public health and medicine.

Engaged in thought-provoking classes in the global health track, Tamara became interested in the work of the United Nations organizations and their involvement in global health. For her practicum experience she headed to Panama City to work as part of the HIV-Nutrition team at the UN World Food Program’s Regional Bureau. Tamara was asked to take the lead role in coordinating an inter-agency project incorporating the needs of people living with HIV into emergency preparedness and response activities in the Latin American and Caribbean region. Her work culminated in a trip to Tegucigalpa, Honduras where she helped to run the first of several planned workshops in the region.

Tamara completed her MPH studies in 2008, and since graduation has been working as a Global Health Fellow with the CDC’s Global AIDS Program in Atlanta. Her work there includes helping to develop an HIV prevention intervention package for HIV care and treatment settings in sub-Saharan Africa. In addition, she spent most of the year in Kenya, Tanzania and Namibia training health care providers and laypersons to deliver prevention messages to their HIV positive patients. Tamara has been accepted to medical school and will eventually embark upon the next journey of her professional and academic life.