Sociomedical Sciences
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Meet Some of Our Doctoral Students
Christopher Alley
Email: ca2205@columbia.edu
Degree program: Ph.D
Track: Anthropology
Areas of interest:
Dengue fever • vector-borne infectious diseases • waste and sanitation • urban poverty and street economies • community policing • social movements • gender • Brazil
Education:
M.A., M.Phil, Sociomedical Sciences, Columbia University (2010)
B.A., Psychology and Criminology, Boston University (1996)
Biographical Note:
Chris' dissertation, provisionally entitled "Dengue Fever and Trash Collection in Brazil: Politics of Responsibility in Favelas of Rio de Janeiro," integrates methods and theory of public health and medical anthropology in an ethnographic investigation of overlapping domains of dengue fever control and social activism. Developing a concept of 'public health citizenship', Chris studies how new dengue prevention policies in Rio promote civil-state trash collection partnerships between government public health entities and socially marginalized waste pickers who struggle for recognition and autonomy in Rio's informal economy of recyclable materials.
Cohort Year: 2005
Althea Anderson
Email: ada2103@columbia.edu
Degree program: Ph.D
Track: Sociology
Areas of Interest:
Intersectional analysis of social inequalities, human rights, and health • gender, sexuality, and health • sexual and gender-based violence prevention • adolescent and young adult health interventions • contemporary masculinities in democratic societies • globalization, social exclusion, and health
Education:
MPH, Maternal and Child Health, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Biographical Note:
Althea's doctoral research explores the influence of legally-constituted rights and the lived experience of inequalities on the construction of contemporary masculinities and young adults' attitudes regarding sexual violence in South Africa. Dr. Jennifer Hirsch is her dissertation sponsor. Althea received a Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council to conduct preliminary dissertation research. She also received a Leitner Family Student Fellowship from Columbia University's Institute for African Studies for this work. Cohort Year: 2009
Nadav Antebi
Email: nadavantebi@gmail.com
Degree program: Ph.D
Track: Psychology
Areas of Interest:
LGBTQQIA populations • sex, sexuality, and gender • stigma, prejudice, and stereotypes • mental health and well-being • resilience • community-based participatory research
Education:
B.A., Behavioral Sciences, Tel-Aviv-Yaffo Academic College, Israel
M.A., Human Development, Cornell University
Biographical Note:
I am primarily interested in the positive and protective aspects of stigma and 'minority' membership, with a specific focus on LGBTQQIA populations. My Master's thesis focused on the positive aspects of LGB people and their sense of well-being. For more than a decade, I have been working with LGBTQQA populations in both community and research settings and am excited about integrating theory and research into real-life practice. Please feel free to contact me.
Cohort Year: 2011
Jocelyn Apicello
Email: jla2117@columbia.edu
Degree Program: DrPH
Education:
MPH, Health Promotion, Columbia University (2006)
B.S., Chemical Engineering, Brown University (2000)
Areas of interest:
Contextual effects on urban health • urbanization, globalization, migration • inequalities and social justice • population-level interventions • the translation of research findings into public policy.
Biographical Note:
She has worked in the field of public health since 2002, with service experience working with people experiencing homelessness and living in unstable housing and research experience studying how housing and other structural interventions can improve health outcomes of formerly incarcerated individuals and people experiencing homelessness. She currently teaches at Hunter College School of Public Health and owns an organic farm in upstate New York.
Jocelyn's dissertation research explores individual and community health within the context of the surrounding ecosystem by investigating the relationship between the urban habitat, gentrification and health in New York City from 1990 to 2008. She is working under the direction of Dr. Peter Messeri and received funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant Program.
Cohort Year: 2006
Kathleen Bachynski
E-mail: keb2168@columbia.edu
Degree Program: Ph.D
Track: History and Ethics
Areas of Interest:
20th century history of American public health • public health ethics • injury prevention • injury and safety culture • risk perception • epidemiology • mental health• genetics
Education:
MPH, Epidemiology, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (2008)
B.A., Anthropology-zoology, Medieval and early modern studies, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (2007)
Biographical Note:
As an undergraduate Kathleen attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she received a BA in anthropology-zoology and medieval & early modern studies (2007), followed by an MPH in epidemiology with an interdepartmental concentration in genetics. Kathleen's master's thesis examined the prevalence of migraine headaches among college students, comparing athletes with non-athletes. Prior to coming to Columbia, she worked in the Veterans Affairs Ann Arbor Healthcare System, for the French Ministry of Education as an English teaching assistant, and at the U.S. Army Public Health Command's Injury Prevention Program. She has studied suicide in the U.S. military, DNA testing for colorectal cancer, motor vehicle collisions, tobacco control policies, and sports-related injuries.
Cohort Year: 2010
Shruti Chhabra
E-mail: sc3223@columbia.edu
Degree Program: Ph.D
Track: Political Science
Areas of interest: Maternal health • India • development theory • globalization processes • policy and governance
Education:
MBB.S., T. N. Medical College, Mumbai, India (2005)
MHA, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India (2008)
Biographical Note:
An Allan Rosenfield Scholar in Sexual and Reproductive Health, Shruti is trying to find her place somewhere between medicine and public health in order to understand health inequities. She has worked in India with the public, the private as well as the non-profit sector, in both urban and rural areas. As diverse as this experience has been, it has given her insights into health systems in the developing world, and raised questions about politics and power in reproductive health policies that she is working on now with the Department of Population and Family Health at MSPH.
Cohort Year: 2010
Stephanie Cook
Email: shc2121@columbia.edu
Degree Program: DrPH
Areas of interest: young adult sexual health • gender • trauma• and mental health
Education:
MPH, Sociomedical Sciences (Research Track), Columbia University (2008)
B.A., Psychology and Women's Studies, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (2005)
Biographical note:
Stephanie Cook is a DrPH candidate in the Sociomedical Sciences Department. She was a recipient of the Initiative to Maximize Diversity institutional training grant from 2008-2010. She is currently a Ruth Kirschstein Individual National Research Service Award Fellow. Her methodological interests are survey research design, structured diary design and community-based research. Her budding interests are in social network analyses and GIS. Her career goal is to become a professor whose work informs health related programming and policy. Stephanie's dissertation entitled, "Psychological Distress, Sexual Behavior, and Adult Attachment among Young Black Men who Have Sex with Men (YBMSM)," focuses on better understanding the relationship between mental health and sexual behavior and examining adult attachment as a moderator of this relationship.
Cohort year: 2008
Amy Dao
Email: lmd2174@columbia.edu
Degree Program: Ph.D
Track: Anthropology
Education:
B.A., Anthropology, University of California-Riverside (2008)
Areas of interest:
Social welfare • Risk, trust, governmentality • Vietnam
Biographical Note:
Amy Dao is studying medical anthropology and pursuing her doctoral studies at Columbia University in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences. She is interested in healthcare reforms and the global movement towards providing universal coverage in low-income countries. In particular, she would like to study the multifaceted meanings of health as they pertain to health insurance in Vietnam. She is theoretically driven by analyses of governmentality and conceptualizations of risk, particularly how each develops and influences local perceptions that enable or undermine state efforts at ensuring the health of its citizens. Since 2008, she has worked as a Project Manager on a NICHD-funded social science project on toddler supervision and injury prevention in Riverside, CA. Currently, she continues to gain research experience in her role as the Project Assistant of the Social Science Training and Research (STAR) Partnership, an NICHD-funded social science and HIV research capacity building project carried out in collaboration between the department of Sociomedical Sciences and Hanoi Medical University.
Cohort year: 2011
Abby DiCarlo
Email: ald2163@columbia.edu
Degree Program: Ph.D
Track: Anthropology
Education:
MPH, Sociomedical Sciences, Columbia University (2011)
M.A., Gender Studies and Anthropology from Claremont Graduate University (2009)
B.A., Women's Studies, University of Massachusetts Boston (2007)
Areas of Interest:
Gender and sexuality • public health and law • masculinities • sex work • sex tourism • migration and health • stigma • HIV/AIDS • feminist theory.
Biographical Note:
Abby is primarily interested in gender and sexuality, and the intersections of public health and law. She has previously worked with the AIDS Action Committee in Boston for the Global Campaign for Microbicides and the Peer Educators Reaching Youth (PERY) program, and at the Center for Gender, Sexuality, and Health for the Latino BiCultural Project. Abby currently works at the HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies as a Program Manager for the Enhanced Prevention in Couples (EPIC) Study, an NIH-funded series of feasibility studies for biomedical and behavioral interventions in Lesotho with the International Center for AIDS Care Treatment and Programs (ICAP). Abby also teaches in the Women's and Gender Studies Department at Rutgers University as an adjunct lecturer. During her time at Claremont Graduate University, Abby won the Maguire Research Assistantship Award for ethnographic research on sex work and sex tourism in Dubai.
Cohort Year: 2011
Claire Edington
Email: cee2106@columbia.edu
Degree Program: Ph.D
Track: History and Ethics
Areas of Interest:
History of public health • history of psychiatry • French colonial history • Southeast Asian studies • gender and sexuality studies • HIV and drug policy
Education:
M.A., MPhil, Columbia University (2010)
B.A., Public Health Studies and French, Johns Hopkins University (2006)
Biographical Note:
Claire's dissertation, entitled "Beyond the asylum: colonial psychiatry in French Indochina, 1890-1954" (Sponsor: Ronald Bayer) and the first book length study of the history of psychiatry in Vietnam, looks beyond the asylum to consider how psychiatry in French Indochina expanded the reach of the late colonial state while working to redefine the relationship between the state and its subjects. Drawing on hundreds of patient case files from archives in both Vietnam and France, this project examines the movements of patients in and out of psychiatric care as a way to better understand how notions of normality and abnormality were produced in negotiations between experts and families, colonial bureaucrats and colonial subjects. This project therefore aims to reorient the colonial history of medicine and public health away from the focus on expert discourses and medical institutions and towards their entanglements with other kinds of colonial projects and indigenous forms of knowledge.
Cohort Year: 2006
Kirk Fiereck
Email: kjf2103@columbia.edu
Degree program: Ph.D
Track: Anthropology
Areas of Interest:
ethnography of biomedicine • public health and expertise • globalization and global health • political economy • postcolonial studies • public health ethics and bioethics • science and technology studies • sexual theory • sexuality, gender, feminist, and queer studies • social movements • risk and the articulation of social difference
Education:
M.Phil., Sociomedical Sciences, Columbia University (2009)
MPH, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Johns Hopkins University (2005)
B.S., Biochemistry, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities-Minneapolis (2001)
Biographical Note:
Kirk's dissertation research examines how sexual and cultural ideologies have been elaborated in relation to homoerotic desire and sexual and gender non-normativity in contemporary South Africa. Drawing on this ethnographic investigation of the ontological politics of opposing sex/gender systems, this project examines how these contradictory systems are contituted as well as contested through complex subject-formation processes as they are enacted within various "development," postcolonial "nation-building," and "decolonization" projects. His research and writing has been supported by the US Department of Education Fulbright-Hays and Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) programs, as well as by the National Institue of Mental Health (NIMH) Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) Fellowship.
Cohort Year: 2006
Somjen Frazer
Email: msf2143@columbia.edu
Degree Program: Ph.D
Track: Sociology
Areas of Interest:
Program evaluation • quantitative methods • gender and sexuality
Education:
MLitt, Sociology, Oxford University's Nuffield College
B.A., Cornell University
Biographical Note:
After working as a program evaluator for several years, she founded a research and evaluation firm, Strength In Numbers Consulting Group, which provides affordable services to progressive not-for-profit and government agencies. She has a particular interest in improving health and social services for marginalized populations, including lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, homeless children and adults, people of color and others. She is the author of numerous reports, peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and conference papers. She is an avid hiker and studies circus arts, including trapeze and acrobatics, at the Lava Studio in Brooklyn.
Cohort Year: 2011
Robert Frey
E-mail: rbf2101@columbia.edu
Degree Program: Ph.D
Track: Anthropology
Areas of interest:
Education:
B.A., (with distinction), Cultural Anthropology (Highest Honors) and French and Francophone Studies, University of Michigan
Biographical Note:
Robert's research interests focus on understanding how public and private institutions respond to the health consequences of war, and the visions of citizenship and society that operate therein. Under the supervision of Dr. Lesley Sharp, Robert is currently completing his dissertation, with funding from Columbia's Earth Institute (AC4 graduate fellowship) and the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy. Based on over a year of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, his project, Injured and Invisible: The Moral Economy of Health Care and the Privatization of Warfare in the United States, investigates two questions: What's at stake for "military contractors" - the civilian employees of private firms performing outsourced military work in overseas war zones - as they readjust to life in the United States with a war injury? And, what conditions render certain forms of war-related affliction and, in turn, certain groups of people afflicted by war, visible or invisible in American society?
Cohort Year: 2003
Allison Goldberg
Email: abg2141@columbia.edu
Degree Program: Ph.D
Track: Political Science
Areas of Interest:
Maternal and child health • health systems strengthening • HIV/AIDS • social determinants of health • politics of public health policymaking • international health • social network analyses • GIS mapping
Education:
M.A., Sociomedical Sciences, Columbia University (2011)
B.A., Political Science (Honors) and Middle Eastern and North African Studies, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (2005)
Biographical Note:
Allison has 7 years of experience in the field of international health. She worked at Abt Associates Inc. since 2005 and the International Center for AIDS Care and Treatment Programs (ICAP) at the Mailman School of Public Health (MSPH) since 2008, on projects related to HIV/AIDS, maternal and child health, and health systems strengthening throughout sub-Saharan Africa, including Uganda, Malawi, Kenya, and Nigeria. In 2011, Allison returned to Abt Associates Inc. as an Associate/Human Resources for Health (HRH) Specialist in the International Health Division. Allison is interested in, and has experience in, research that focuses on the role of macro-level politics and policy on public health outcomes and improving the demand for, and delivery of, health services. Allison's dissertation research explores the impact of social networks on childhood immunization uptake in northern Nigeria. This research involved collecting GPS and survey data from mothers about their immunization decisions and community leaders about their perceptions of childhood immunizations living in 22 rural neighborhoods from October to November 2011.
Cohort Year: 2008
Elisa Gonzalez
Email emg2173@columbia.edu
Degree Program: Ph.D
Track: History and Ethics
Education:
B.S., Biology, University of Puerto Rico-Cayey
M.A., Latin American History from the State University of New York-Albany (2009)
Areas of Interest:
History of public health and medicine • Latin America and the Caribbean
Biographical Note:
As a student in the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health, Elisa's current research focuses on public health and medical sciences in relation to economic development and industrializing policies during mid-20th century Puerto Rico. Specifically, she is interested in nutrition science, programs, and policies and how these interacted with the political economy and decolonizing initiatives of that time period. Her pre-dissertation research was supported by a travel grant from the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University.
Cohort Year: 2009
Radhika Gore
Email: rjg150@columbia.edu
Degree Program: Ph.D
Track: Political Science
Areas of Interest:
Health care systems • community-based development • participation • political development
Education:
B.A., Economics and Mathematics, Virginia Tech
M.A., International Affairs (concentration: economic and political development), Columbia University
Biographical Note:
Radhika entered the Ph.D program in Sociomedical Sciences in 2008, having worked for over four years with international development organizations, including UNICEF, the World Bank, and UNESCO. Her dissertation research will focus on the politics of primary care in urban India; she will examine health care law and administration as well as collective claims for improved primary care in Mumbai. Radhika is an Allan Rosenfield scholar at the Mailman School of Public Health, and received a dissertation proposal development award from the Social Science Research Council to conduct preliminary research in India.
Cohort Year: 2008
Akua Gyamerah
Email: aog2105@columbia.edu
Degree Program: DrPH
Areas of Interest:
African sexualities • gender • human rights & health • postcolonial studies • globalization & identity formation • HIV/AIDS prevention • NGOs & international AIDS funding politics
Education:
MPH (Sociomedical Sciences), Columbia University (2010)
B.A., College Scholar Program, Cornell University
Biographical Note:
Akua is a DrPH student and a Gates Millenium Scholar. Prior to her graduate studies at Columbia, she worked as a Research Assistant at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine on a community based participatory research project aimed at preventing and managing diabetes in East Harlem. Before that, Akua attended Cornell University where she attained her Bachelor of Arts degree in the College Scholar Program with an independent major titled, "The Role of Socioeconomic Inequalities on the Nutrition and Health Status of Sub-Sahara African Women and Children." Akua's doctoral research interests are in examining cultural understandings of sexuality, gender, and health in postcolonial Africa, with a focus on Ghana.
Cohort Year: 2010
Brendan Hart
Email: bgh2105@columbia.edu
Degree Program: Ph.D
Track: Anthropology
Areas of Interest:
Autism • psy sciences • translation • ethics • expertise • Middle East and North African studies
Education:
B.A., Cultural Anthropology, University of Michigan (2005)
Biographical Note:
I have been working with children with autism as a caregiver and therapist since 2002. My research focuses on the sociology of expertise and the ethics of care for people with severe cognitive or intellectual disabilities. I have worked with Gil Eyal on a historical and sociological project concerning the causes and consequences of autism's recent rise to prominence. On the basis of that work, we coauthored a book, The Autism Matrix (with Emine Onculer, Neta Oren, Natasha Rossi. Polity Press, 2010), and an article (Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 2010). I am currently finishing up fieldwork for my dissertation (supervised by Lesley Sharp) about the treatment and diagnosis of autism and related disabilities in Morocco. My work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Osmundsen Initiative, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Institute for Maghrib Studies.
Cohort Year: 2006
Gina Jae
Email: gj2008@columbia.edu
Degree Program: Ph.D
Track: Anthropology
Areas of interest:
Health disparities, sickle cell disease, refugees and survivors of torture, chronic illness management, translating medical technologies to clinical practice. Geographic areas of interest include: New York City, Brazil/Lusophone diaspora, Spanish-speaking Latin America
Education:
MD, University of Illinois at Chicago
MPH, Population and Family Health, Columbia University
B.A., Spanish, Rice University
Biographical Note:
Her ongoing research has involved refugee survivors of torture and families and caregivers of children with sickle cell disease. She has worked as a community-based public health worker in Brazil, Mexico, and Paraguay and as a primary care physician for refugee survivors of torture living in New York City.
Cohort Year: 2008
Nora J. Kenworthy
Email: njk2110@columbia.edu
Degree Program: Ph.D
Track: Political Science
Areas of Interest:
Political anthropology • health / biological citizenship • southern Africa • health systems research
Education:
B.A., Williams College
Biographical Note:
Nora's research focuses on the politics of health care access, and how health-promoting institutions alter political systems and citizenship, in the United States and in southern Africa. Prior to attending Columbia, she worked in public health program delivery in the Western US and South Africa. Her dissertation research, which she recently completed, examines how scale-ups in HIV programming are changing citizen participation, state accountability and everyday civic life in Lesotho. She has also conducted research to document the lives and situations of undocumented immigrants residing within state psychiatric hospitals in the northeastern U.S. Her work has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright IIE U.S. Student Program, and the American Association of University Women.
Cohort Year: 2006
Rebecca A. Kruger
Email: rak2136@columbia.edu
Degree Program: Ph.D
Track: Sociology
Areas of interest:
Reproductive health • development • gender • human rights • fair trade • Latin America
Education:
M.Sc., Population and Development, The London School of Economics and Political Science
B.A., Government and the Plan II Honors Program, University of Texas-Austin
Biographical Note:
Rebecca is a Fellow in the NIH pre-doctoral training program in Gender, Sexuality, and Health. She has also received research funding from the Social Sciences Research Council and the Columbia University Institute for Latin American Studies. Her research interests include reproductive health, gender, development, human rights, and Fair Trade, particularly in Latin America.
Cohort Year: 2009
Sara E. Lewis
Email: sel2127@columbia.edu
Degree program: Ph.D
Track: Anthropology
Areas of Interest:
Psychiatric and psychological anthropology • anthropology of religion • refugee mental health • clinical ethnography
Education:
M.A., Social Sciences, University of Chicago (2005)
A.M., Social Work, University of Chicago (2007)
B.A., Interdisciplinary major, St. Lawrence University (2003)
Biographical Note:
Sara has long been interested in the intersections between mental health, culture and religion. Sara's dissertation research involves a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Dharamsala, India, where she investigates how Buddhism and other sociocultural factors support coping and resilience among Tibetan refugees (dissertation sponsor is Prof. Kim Hopper). This research is funded through a Fulbright-Nehru award and the Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund (SYLFF), through the Columbia University Weatherhead East Asian Institute. She has also worked as a junior research scientist with the Center to Study Recovery in Social Contexts, an NIMH-funded center at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research. In addition to her research activities, Sara has worked as a psychotherapist in community mental health settings since 2005, where she focuses on the treatment of serious and persistent mental illness.
Cohort Year: 2007
Mariana Da Cunha De Queiroz Martins
Email: mcm2203@columbia.edu
Degree Program: Ph.D
Track: Psychology
Areas of interest:
Social and health psychology • diet and obesity • Latino health • advertising • quantitative methods
Education : B.A. (Summa Cum Laude), Psychology, Studio Art , Stony Brook University 2009
Biographical Note:
Mariana's main area of interest is diet, particularly the quantitative effects of advertising and health framing on eating behavior, assessed through both neighborhood level analyses of advertisement density and individual level experiments to investigate the efficacy of different types of health advertising. She is particularly interested in these areas as they relate to Latino immigrants within the US, with an emphasis on the effects of culturally-relevant and language-relevant initiatives and advertisements. She is also a painter, avid knitter, and overall geek.
Cohort Year: 2009
William Mellman
Email: wlm2112@columbia.edu
Degree program: Ph.D
Track: Sociology
Areas of interest:
Sexual identity • gender identity • social determinants of health • health disparities and outcomes • mental health
Education:
M.S.W. Clinical Social Work, University of Pennsylvania (2009)
B.A.. Neuroscience and Women's Studies, Wellesley College (2004)
Biographical Note:
Will is primarily interested in health disparities in the transgender community as they relate to the LGBT community and society at large. Prior to attending Columbia, Will worked as a clinical therapist for children in various community behavioral health clinics in Philadelphia as well as a patient advocate and clinical case manager for perinatally infected children with HIV in the Special Immunology department at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). Will's current interests broadly include a qualitative approach to studying the social factors that influence the health practices and outcomes of transgender individuals as well as the particular needs of transgender individuals as it relates to health services.
Cohort Year: 2011
Anne Montgomery
Email: amm2195@columbia.edu
Degree program: Ph.D
Track: Sociology
Areas of interest:
Science and technology studies • North African studies • politics of global health interventions • political sociology • participatory approaches to public health • gender and sexuality studies
Education:
M.S., Harvard School of Public Health
B.A., Interdisciplinary Studies, University of California-Berkeley
Biographical Note:
Anne has been a pre-doctoral fellow in both the NIH Gender, Sexuality, and Health Fellowship program and the NSF-IGERT International Development & Globalization traineeship program. Under the guidance of Professor Carole S. Vance and with support from Fulbright, the National Science Foundation, and the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, Anne's dissertation research will explore how civil society organizations respond to the challenges of carrying out HIV prevention with vulnerable and hard to reach groups in Morocco's highest prevalence region. Prior to coming to Columbia, Anne gained significant experience in design, implementation, and evaluation of health promotion and community development programs in the U.S., Africa, and Latin America. She has also founded peer-led sexual health promotion programs at Brown University and Harvard College.
Cohort Year: 2006
Laura Murray
Email: lrm2137@columbia.edu
Degree program: Ph.D
Track: Anthropology
Areas of interest:
Gender • sexuality • HIV • cultural activism • Brazil
Education:
M.S., International Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (2005)
Bachelors, Political Science and Women's Studies, Wellesley College (2000)
Biographical Note:
Laura has worked on issues related to gender, sexuality, and health as a researcher, activist, and filmmaker since 2000, earning a Thomas J. Watson fellowship to work with international sex worker rights organizations from 2000-2001 and working in HIV prevention and sexual health programs in the Dominican Republic, Peru, and most recently, Brazil from 2001-2010. Her dissertation is focused on the politics of prostitution, HIV prevention, and sex worker activism in Brazil and is being carried out under the supervision of Dr. Richard Parker.
Cohort Year: 2008
Ronna Popkin
Email: rp2471@columbia.edu
Degree program: Ph.D
Track: Sociology
Areas of Interest:
Adolescent and young adult sexual and reproductive health • sexuality education • women's health in the U.S. • sociologies of sexuality, gender, education, science, and technology.
Education:
M.S., Health Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison
B.S., Women's Studies (with Honors), University of Wisconsin-Madison
Biographical Note:
Ronna is a Fellow in the NIH pre-doctoral training program in Gender, Sexuality, and Health. Prior to coming to Columbia, Ronna worked as a Community Sexuality Educator for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin and lectured courses at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on sexuality education, women's health, and the politics of fertility control.
Cohort Year: 2009
Jessica Roberts
Email: jlr2161@columbia.edu
Degree program: Ph.D
Track: Sociology
Areas of Interest:
HIV/AIDS • psychosocial factors in health behaviors and outcomes • sexual and reproductive health • health of immigrants • urban American Indian health • marginalized populations • interdisciplinary research• gender and critical race theory
Education:
MPH, Behavioral Science and Health Education, Emory University (2009)
B.A. (with distinction), Women's Studies and Latin American Studies, University of Michigan (2007)
Biographical Note:
Jessica is a researcher at the Center for the Psychosocial Study of Health and Illness at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Prior to coming to Columbia, she held internships and positions at CDC in the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention, CARE USA, Planned Parenthood, and UNDP in the HIV/AIDS Regional Programme in the Arab States, in Cairo, Egypt.
Since joining the doctoral program, she has worked on a study exploring the sexual and reproductive health behaviors and beliefs of seroconcordant and serodiscordant heterosexual couples living with HIV. Her current research, funded by the NIMH, focuses on socially marginalized people living with HIV who have become disengaged from care.
Cohort Year: 2010
Sara Shoener
Email: sjs2162@columbia.edu
Degree program: DrPH
Areas of Interest:
Gender-based violence • the sociology of organizations and institutions • social movements • qualitative program evaluation
Education:
B.S., Biomathematics and Philosophy, University of Scranton
MPH, Sociomedical Sciences (Health Promotion), Columbia University
Biographical Note:
Sara's dissertation focuses on the ways in which government funding shapes the services and social change work of local domestic violence service organizations (sponsor: Dr. Jennifer Hirsch). Before coming to Columbia, Sara worked for a national organization in Washington, DC, providing training and technical assistance to domestic violence attorneys and advocates.
Cohort Year: 2009
Ana Stefancic
Email: as2463@columbia.edu
Degree program: Ph.D
Track: Sociology
Areas of interest:
Homelessness, mental health services, housing programs, survey research, qualitative methods.
Education:
B.A., Psychology, New York University
Biographical Note:
Ana Stefancic is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences. Her recent research focuses on exploring the effectiveness of Housing First services and studying homelessness, mental illness, and housing, within the context of poverty, disability, recovery, social inclusion and citizenship. She is a research consultant with Pathways to Housing, Inc., the NIMH-funded New York Services Study, and The Osborne Association.
Cohort Year: 2003
Siri Suh
Degree program: Ph.D
Track: Sociology
Biographical Note:
Having recently worked in family planning and maternal health programs in Senegal, her research interests continue to center around reproductive health in sub-Saharan Africa. Ms. Suh wishes to investigate the silence surrounding unsafe abortion in this region and the role of religion, social constructions of gender and sexuality, politicized national and international reproductive health agendas, organized medicine and the law in perpetuating this silence. She is particularly interested in how health professionals negotiate decisions to provide clandestine abortion within this context.
Cohort Year: 2007
Nityanjali Thumalachetty
Email: nt2285@columbia.edu
Degree program: DrPH
Areas of Interest:
Sexual health • reproductive health • gender • HPV • cervical cancer • developing countries
Education:
MPH, Sociomedical Sciences, Columbia University (2011)
M.A., Bioethics, Case Western Reserve University (2009)
B.S., Molecular, Cellular, and Development Biology, UCLA (2006)
Biographical Note:
Nityanjali is primarily interested in sexual and reproductive health of women in developing countries, with a specific focus on India. She has worked in Ernst & Young's health sciences sector in India where she was able to interact extensively with state governments on public-private partnerships for health projects and with life science companies. She has also worked as a graduate research associate at the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania (a unique policy-focused center with an emphasis on contemporary India), focusing on higher education and regulatory frameworks in the life sciences in India, and the reverse migration of life science talent from the United States to India. Nitya's current interests broadly include a mixed-methods approach to studying HPV and cervical cancer among peri-urban and rural Indian women and girls.
Cohort Year: 2011
Yoav Vardy
Email: yv2143@columbia.edu
Degree program: Ph.D
Track: Anthropology
Areas of Interest:
Critical age studies • anthropology of age • embodiment and disembodiment • critical approaches to genetic research • anthropological demography • feminist and queer theories
Education:
MPhil (with merit), Multi-Disciplinary Gender Studies, University of Cambridge
B.A. (First Class) in Human Sciences, University of Oxford
Biographical Note:
Yoav is a Hearst Foundations Doctoral Fellow in Public Health and Aging. Yoav earned his Master of Philosophy (with merit) in Multi-Disciplinary Gender Studies from the University of Cambridge, with a dissertation focusing on the life-stories of older men who have sex with men in South-East England. He received his Bachelor of Arts (First Class) in Human Sciences from the University of Oxford, a program which combines studies in genetics, physiology, epidemiology, anthropology, linguistics, and evolutionary biology.
Cohort Year: 2011
Brooke S. West
Email: bsw2110@columbia.edu
Degree program: Ph.D
Track: Sociology
Areas of interest:
Social determinants of health, social theory, gender and sexuality, HIV-AIDS, drug use, conceptualizations of risk, social marginalization, research design and methodology, intervention research
Education:
BA, Sociology, Cleveland State University
MA, Sociology, Cornell University
Biographical Note:
At the broadest level, Brooke's research focuses on social determinants of health, primarily in the context of HIV prevention and treatment. Her dissertation, "The Real Risks of Fishing: Reconceptualizing HIV Risk among Drug Using Fishermen in Malaysia," is a mixed methods study assessing how risk perception and HIV risk decision-making are fundamentally social (rather than biomedical) processes that are shaped by social networks and conceptualizations of masculinity. She has also conducted research with women involved in sex work in India, migrant marketplace workers in Kazakhstan, and has looked at the intersection between gender, water/sanitation, and HIV health outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa. While a doctoral student at Columbia, she has held an NIH-funded training fellowship in Gender, Sexuality, and Health and a NIDA-funded training fellowship in Drug Abuse Research. She has also served as a Visiting Research Fellow in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. Currently, she works as the Principal Research Associate on a NIDA-funded study entitled, "Community Vulnerability and Responses to Drug-User-Related HIV/AIDS (CVAR)," which assesses changes over time in the HIV epidemic among injection drug users in 96 of the largest cities in the nited States.
Cohort Year: 2007
Contact Us
Department of Sociomedical Sciences
Mailman School of Public Health
Columbia University
Allan Rosenfield Building
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New York, NY 10032
212-305-5656
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