Current Students

Environmental Health Science

Kyisin Aung
Kyisin grew up in both rich and poor cities such as Rangoon, New York, Bangkok, Baltimore, and Geneva, which enabled her to see the astounding disparities in environmental quality and opportunities for healthcare. Stemming from life experiences in both developing and developed nations, she developed an interest in the intimate relationship between environmental quality (particularly water quality), and human health. She therefore pursued a Bachelor of Science degree in Environmental Science at Towson University. Upon graduating from Towson, Kyisin interned at the World Health Organization for six months to explore and gain experience in the public health field. She plans to pursue a career as a global public health practitioner focusing on environmental public health challenges that are fundamental to the health of individuals and communities.

Lindsay McCormick
Although the majority of Lindsay’s background is in molecular biology research, she was drawn to public health because the field provides the opportunity to tangibly improve the lives of entire populations. One of her main global concerns is malnutrition, a topic she first became interested in during a course at UC Berkeley in 2007, and she further pursued this interest through a nutritional research internship at Children’s Hospital in Oakland.  For Lindsay, the possibility of utilizing dietary change to improve quality of life is an exciting prospect. Her other main interest is environmental protection, which she explored as an intern at Save the Bay - a non-profit that organizes volunteers to remove litter and plant native species along the San Francisco Bay.  There is a complex interplay between human and environmental health and Lindsay plans to combine the two fields by implementing strategies that restore the environment, leading to improvements in public health.  

Emily Hall
Emily graduated with her B.A. in Latin American Studies and Spanish, and has been working for the past six years as a program specialist at the Tennessee Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence where she planned, implemented, and evaluated a variety of projects, including a statewide cultural competency initiative and a teen dating violence prevention project.  Emily decided to change the focus of her work to issues related to environmental health in the global context after a series of personal experiences she had in 2006 while living in Oaxaca, Mexico, where each residence was supplied only once a with enough water to last about four days. Emily’s eyes were opened to the gravity of water-related environmental health problems and disparities, and as a result, she feels passionate about addressing these issues. She wants to design and conduct research on environmental health issues related to water resources, and plans to utilize approaches such as community based participatory research to ensure that research and interventions are culturally relevant, important to and equitably benefiting all communities involved.

Epidemiology

Han-Lu  Yang
Han-Lubecame interested in global health starting in high school, with a volunteer teaching position serving a mountainous village of Taiwan. It was here where she first observed the prevalence of infectious diseases and its impact on the health of local populations, particularly women and children in underprivileged contexts. She pursued her interest in global health during college, where she exploring the impact of global warming on infectious disease pattern through the use of GIS. During the summer, she traveled to India and Ecuador to advocate the significance of nutrition and clean water in enhancing the health of rural communities where she became aware of the intricate network of social, economic, and cultural factors which influence individual health status, as well as the interplay between human health and climate change. She is eager to learn about and decipher infectious disease distribution in light of the climate change; but she is also enthralled to explore the wide array of determinants that contributed to the HIV epidemic in the hopes of formulating population-based prevention strategies as well as more cost-effective clinical care delivery.

Josh Brooks
Josh received his undergraduate degree at University of Colorado-Boulder. He worked in research laboratories, in biotechnology at Genentech, as a writer for ESPN and, most recently, as the associate editor of Transworld Skateboarding magazine. Despite his non-traditional background, Josh has witnessed the private world of health in biotech and the public world of global health, when he lived in Santiago, Chile and visited Cuba. His experiences led him to become interested in working globally as an epidemiologist aimed at focusing on HIV and waterborne diseases. He is particularly interested in the intersection between the private sector and public health, and would like to find a way to create a consensus for supporting multidisciplinary work abroad by merging seemingly unrelated fields. One of his many goals is to use specific evidence-based research in conjunction with the implementation of new public health programs, and hopes to utilize resources such as editorial, photography, and video to accurately present global health issues to the public, making those issues both tangible and real.

Melody Manyasha
Melody Manyasha is a statistician with a background in health statistics. Her work has involved the collection and analysis of data pertaining to water-borne diseases, occupational diseases, cancer, and HIV/AIDS. Her career goal is to consult Monitoring & Evaluation programs. She intends to return to southern Africa to expand her participation in the strengthening of health information systems, to promote results-based programming by enhancing the M&E capacity of healthcare workers/managers, and inculcating a culture of data appreciation and data use in patient and program monitoring.

Markay Hopps
Markay’s Global Studies degree at UCLA broadened her passion in health promotion to include the health of global populations, writing her senior thesis on French nuclear tests and the subsequent health traumas and displacement that the South Pacific populations were exposed to. For the last two years, she has worked at the UC Global Health Institute (UCGHI) - a multi-campus, multi-discipline education and research center. Markay helped support the incipient stages with global health curriculum research, grant projections, and faculty organization. Because of her thesis work, she is interested in global disaster preparedness and the health of populations exposed to both war and natural catastrophes.

Dimitra Panagiotoglou
Dimitra Panagiotoglou graduated from the University of Toronto’s Mechanical Engineering program. Following her graduation, she interned at Africa’s Children—Africa’s Future, which is an international NGO that works to promote awareness of the HIV epidemic amongst youth, and provides psychosocial support to child-headed households in Africa. She also recently began an internship with Community Lab as a Health Systems Analyst, where she is responsible for designing a model that can be used to prioritize health objectives raised by regional needs based assessments for the Nigerian government. Her goal is to study the use of generic antiretrovirals by HIV-infected patients in resource poor settings and provide strategic suggestions to improve management and care of the disease.

Raina Sharma
Raina Sharma graduated from Bucknell with a degree in Biology and Sociology. During her time at Bucknell, she conducted research on flame-retardants at the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburg, and after graduation, she worked in the Institute of Medicine (IOM) at the National Academies. Her studies at IOM ranged in topics from secondhand smoke exposure and CVD, priorities to reduce and control hypertension, and priorities in the National Vaccine Plan. Her main interests are the effect of climate change on the patterns of infectious diseases and health disparities, but overall, she hopes her time at Mailman will help build her understanding of how the biologic fundamentals of living organisms and the social determinants of populations affect the spread of disease so that it can be effectively controlled and prevented.

David (Tad) Henry
Tad’s aspirations in the field of global health are to eradicate and ameliorate infectious disease worldwide, with a focus on disease origins, and the interface between environment and disease.  He would like to prevent human epidemics of disease by minimizing stress on the environment (concentrated animal feeding operations, the bush meat trade, deforestation, and agriculture change, etc.).  He has conducted research in the Peruvian Amazon, measuring and comparing the amount of carbon in biomass that different rainforest habitats sequester - a project with climate change implications.  He has also spent 3 months in Tanzania working for a non-profit, teaching about HIV and attempting to minimize the stigma surrounding the disease.

Stephanie Moody-Geissler
Stephanie Moody-Geissler received a B.S. in Microbiology from UC San Diego. She is particularly interested in Neglected Tropical Diseases, HIV and sexually-transmitted infections.  She has worked for several HIV research and outpatient care facilities, most recently on a patient retention study, and has also been involved with Planned Parenthood for many years, volunteering on community outreach projects and serving on the board of directors in San Diego. For the past four years she has volunteered and worked in Arusha, Tanzania for a period of 2 to 6 months every year, with an NGO that focuses on sexual health and gender equality issues. After Mailman, she hopes to attend medical school and use her combined training to work as an effective Infectious Disease specialist

Mar Velarde
Mar Velardebegan her study of global health when she enrolled at the University of Barcelona to study “Tropical Medicine and International Health.” Following these studies, she was employed by two international organizations: the World Health Organization and the International Federation of the Red Cross Red Crescent. During the time she was working for the WHO Chagas disease programme, she was particularly involved in the “non-endemic countries initiative”. Her contribution has been largely related to the design and implementation of the world drug procurement system, and the world Chagas disease information system and mapping. Her objective is to become a fully trained professional in public health within a global context, and eventually to contribute her expertise and commitment to tackle global health issues affecting under-served populations, particularly neglected ones.

Rebecca (Becky) Hanna
Growing up in Indonesia and Hong Kong, Rebecca attended Wellesley College soon after Hong Kong’s SARS epidemic, and became interested in Global Health issues. She interned at the Women and Children Clinic in Jakarta, Indonesia, where she was responsible for assisting patients and authored informational brochures on asthma, infertility and lactation. After graduation, she worked within Analysis Group’s healthcare consulting practice, where her projects included building a cost-effectiveness model that compared therapy for Crohn’s Disease, employing claims to isolate changes in costs after enrollment in a disease management program, and assisting in the write up of manuscripts for peer-reviewed journals. She hopes to improve her technical skills in order to isolate the effect of new health interventions in Asia and Africa, particularly with infectious disease and its connection to migration and the behavior of women.

Malaya Fletcher
Malaya Fletcher received a B.S. in Microbiology and a certificate in Health Care Organizations and Society. Following her undergraduate studies, she studied in India as a Boren scholar and volunteered with two NGOs, observing and evaluating UNICEF’s immunization program and Rajasthan state’s sterilization program. After returning from India, she worked as a project manager helping the K-12 education system plan for flu pandemics. Her interest is in infectious disease epidemiology, monitoring and evaluation, and emergency planning. She aspires to identify systemic issues that prohibit the mitigation of infectious diseases, and is interested in outcome-based research that takes into account the interrelationships between humans, infectious diseases, and their environment, so that better tools and health-care policies can be developed.

Health Policy & Management

Jana Smith
Jana began her experience in global health in the area of health promotion, when she coordinated the training program designed for Pro Mujer’s female microfinance clients in Argentina, creating and managing a network of providers in a system similar to a basic primary care insurance plan.  She worked to introduce a number of initiatives in order to increase satisfaction, quality, and usage of the services, especially female and child focused preventive care. Her main interests in global health are in women’s health, especially in the areas of reproductive health, nutrition, and chronic disease, and in social enterprise, with a focus on partnerships, integrated programming, and micro entrepreneurs.

Janosch Mahmoudian
Janosch came from an academic background in International Relations and International Law, and gained his first professional experience with the Early Recovery Team at the UNDP Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery. While his key responsibilities consisted of supporting countries struck by natural disasters in their longer-term recovery, he realized the pivotal function of health as the basis for development. His assignments with the GTZ Health Sector Programme Kenya and the UNDP Finance Unit enabled him to work on public health initiatives on the ground, from both a policy and a financial management perspective. His aspiration in global health is to learn more about the specific public health challenges in resource-poor settings and effective means to approach them. His professional goal is to improve the public’s health in low-income countries through expanding equitable and sustainable health care coverage, ideally in the management of rural and semi-rural field hospitals.

Cho-Yau Ling
Cho-Yau Ling received a B.A. from Tufts University in International Relations and Asian Studies. While with the Peace Corps, he worked in Kazakhstan with a provincial HIV center and a narcotic prevention and outreach program, where he assisted both organizations in building sustainable and effective community health projects. He became fascinated in finding solutions to health problems with no resources; a problem that often plagues other community health organizations in low-income countries.  After working with Peace Corps, he interned with the CDC to further his experience with health project management in developing nations. At Mailman, he hopes to gain a deeper understanding of how cost-effective and sustainable programs are created and developed to solve public health problems, such as substance abuse.  

Sharon Kim
Sharon Kim graduated from the University of Chicago with a B.A. in Public Policy, and her thesis paper was on health disparities in the OB/GYN departments that affected women with Medicaid after the implementation of the Urban Health Initiative. After graduation, she worked as a program coordinator at the Global Health Initiative where her main task was to help develop a global health Master’s program at the University of Chicago, but when earthquakes hit Haiti in January, her priority was to coordinate and manage volunteers for the Chicago-land disaster relief efforts in Haiti. Her career goal is to recapture the world's attention on the health care needs of North Koreans and to promote a peaceful reunification of North and South Korea. After she receives her MPH, she hopes to become a policy adviser to the Ministry of Unification in South Korea to start healthy conversations on how South Korea (and the rest of the world) can bring health care to North Koreans.

Stephanie Kujawski
Stephani graduated from Stanford University in 2006, with a B.A. in Psychology. She later worked in Zambia as a Pediatric Senior Program Officer with the Clinton Foundation’s HIV/AIDS Initiative. There, she collaborated with the Zambian Ministry of Health to evaluate, design, and implement national pediatric HIV/AIDS testing and treatment programs and policies, including the scale up of early infant diagnosis services, the development and roll out of a pediatric fixed-dose combination ARV training curriculum, and a clinical mentorship pilot program. Stephanie would like to continue to work internationally for either a NGO or directly for a government on health systems strengthening projects. While her current interest is in HIV/AIDS policy and program development, she looks forward to exploring other fields within the global health realm during her time at the Mailman School of Public Health.

Population & Family Health

Ksenia Varlyguina
Before attending Columbia University, Ksenia directed a high school youth development program focused on sexual health and service learning in Everett, MA, where many of her students were first-generation immigrants. As an undergraduate at Clark University, Ksenia majored in English and Psychology, with minors in Spanish and Gender Studies. She studied abroad in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic for six months, where she interned with an international organization providing transitional career counseling to sex workers. She has taught English to medical students, and traveled extensively through Central and South America. In 2007, Ksenia completed a professional practicum in adolescent sexual health at the Center for Adolescent Reproductive Medicine and Development (CEMERA), located in Santiago, Chile.

Hattie Plexico
For the past two years, Hattie was a Meeting Planner for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) in Washington, D.C., where she assisted in implementing meetings and events that brought together key stakeholders from government, the private sector, and the pharmaceutical industry.  Prior to joining PhRMA, Hattie was a health volunteer with the Peace Corps in Morocco, where she partnered with the local health clinic and ran community health lessons.  Hattie’s interest in maternal and child health began while working with a midwife in the region.  Hattie chose Mailman for its unique interdisciplinary and practical approach that prepares students not only academically for a career in public health, but also gives them the opportunity for hands-on field experience. 

Ha Nguyen
Ha Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American whose parents emigrated from Vietnam in the late 1970's. Because of her upbringing, she developed a passion for serving at-risk communities, targeting parents who were immigrants and had limited education. Prior to joining Mailman, she worked as a teacher and health advocate within South Central, Los Angeles.  She plans to use her MPH as a project director developing programs focused in improving the health of inner-city/at-risk populations. Ha is interest in traveling abroad and hopes to one day create a program that will not only educate children, but also empower them to make the decisions necessary to break the behavioral cycles that threaten their communities.

Anu-Raga Mahalingahetty
Anu-Raga earned her BA in Cultural Anthropology at Transylvania University in Kentucky.  During her undergraduate studies, she spent a semester in South Africa as part of a public health program that focused on health disparities and HIV/AIDS in the Eastern Cape. She worked in India for three years as part of a Monitoring and Evaluation team assessing Avahan - an initiative funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to decrease HIV/AIDS in India. As a qualitative researcher her responsibilities included conducting focus group discussions and in-depth interviews with female sex workers. Her interests include women’s health, specifically infectious disease and HIV/AIDS in countries where disparities in disease burden are high.

Leslie Yap
Leslie Yap was born and raised in Hawaii and completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Miami. Leslie discovered her interest in maternal and child health while living and working as a community health development volunteer in a rural village during her three-year Peace Corps service in Burkina Faso.  While in Burkina, her work focused on health promotion and education for both the community at large and in area schools via collaboration with the community health clinic management, its nursing staff, and a local theatre group.  More specifically, she assisted in monitoring children’s weight and infant vaccination schedules, providing mothers with nutrition recommendations.  She also worked on the monitoring and distribution of World Food Program rations to malnourished children and expectant mothers.  She would like to implement programs that will improve rural health systems to better serve communities and will empower women in making health decisions for themselves and their children.

Navita Sahai
Navita Sahai is a Northwestern University graduate with a degree in economics and a minor in global health. She has worked for two years at the Lewin Group - a public health consulting firm located just outside of Washington D.C. - focusing on a variety of projects ranging from estimating the cost of diabetes to forecasting the supply and demand of the healthcare workforce. In the summer of 2009, Navita took a leave of absence from Lewin to work in Cambodia at the Reproductive and Child Health Alliance (RACHA) as a USAID Global Health Fellow where she evaluated home-based care programs for migrant workers living with HIV/AIDS and services offered to orphans and vulnerable children. Having spent three years working at a battered women’s shelter, she hopes to study violence against women on an international level, and would like to work at a non-profit organization that addresses how human rights affect healthcare outcomes. 

Janet Ajao
After graduating from UC Berkeley with a B.A. in Public Health, Janet spent some time working in community health programs, first in the planning department at a community clinic in Oakland, CA and then as a project manager at the University of Southern California School of Dentistry where she managed an oral health baseline needs assessment of underprivileged children in Los Angeles County. Janet most recently completed a Fulbright research scholarship in Nigeria where she traced the history of family planning programs in northern Nigeria to provide a context for understanding the programs as they exist today. She developed a strong interest in primary health care, the effects of poverty, and preventable diseases. Janet hopes to continue managing programs and working as a researcher domestically or internationally on projects and programs that impact the developing world, specifically in the areas of primary health care, and maternal and child health.

Rachel Gonzalez
Rachel attended Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, earning an undergraduate degree in Public Health.  After graduation, she spent time in Cuernavaca, Mexico volunteering for a community-based organization that served local families who had migrated from rural areas to urban centers to find work. Upon returning to California, she became a case manager for both Spanish and English-speaking families in Orange County, and then worked for four years as the manager of a clinical trials office focused on cancer prevention research at the UC Irvine Medical Center. Rachel would like to apply the skills she gained from clinical research in chronic disease to program planning and research of infectious diseases, both domestically and abroad.

Minyoung Kim
Minyoung was born and raised in South Korea, but began studying in the U.S. her sophomore year of high school. She graduated from Clemson University with a B.A. in Language (Chinese) and International Trade, a B.S. in Language and International Health, and a minor in Business Administration. After graduation, she worked as an international patient coordinator at Seoul National University Hospital (SNUH) in South Korea for a year where she was able to apply her training from college to provide general administrative works between the hospital and its clients. While studying at Columbia, Minyoung plans to develop health programs that are specific to each country’s unique culture in order to eliminate international health disparities.

Pema McGuinness
Pema is a Tibetan-American who grew up in Nepal and Hong Kong, and is interested in the fundamental links between health, poverty, inequality, and human rights. During her undergraduate studies at Duke University, she pursued summer internships at public health organizations including Refugee Family Services in Atlanta, GA; Beijing AIDS Institute in Beijing, China; and the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS in New York City. After graduating, she worked at a public health consulting firm in New York City for two years, collaborating with pharmaceutical companies on different aspects of their drug access programs where she helped to organize the first high-level consultation on women’s involvement in HIV trials at the UNAIDS headquarters in Geneva. She also worked for Family Health International in Kathmandu, where she focused on the roll-out of two new initiatives: an HIV education pilot program in Nepali prisons and a research study and pilot program focused on increasing pregnant women’s access to ARVs for the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV. Pema has been working with a public health professor in Tibet on a proposal to conduct the first comprehensive demographic and health survey of Tibetan populations.

Jenny Tiberio
Jenny completed her undergraduate degree at McGill University in International Development and African Studies.  She seeks to engage in public health work with marginalized populations in a multidisciplinary, collaborative fashion, and has recently become more interested in the issue of forced migration. While living in East Africa, she helped to orchestrate a mobile clinic with Ugandan medical students in an internally displaced persons camp in northern Uganda.  She has worked in Tanzania in health clinics and with an HIV women’s group that was conducting income generating projects and providing home-based care to sick members. She has also worked in Panama helping to implement an after-school health course at a rural school. Jenny aims to bring a more informed discourse in our society about people in the developing world, where she hopes to contribute to reshaping the way we approach "international health" and humanitarian aid.

Tessema Garedew
Tessema’s completed his undergraduate degree in Africana Studies at California State University, Long Beach.  He spent his first year after graduating working in the education field up until his yearlong stay in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where he got the opportunity to teach English at the British International School. His experiences abroad lead to an interest in public health as he witnessed the health status of numerous countries. His aspirations include establishing an organization in Ethiopia that works to meet the basic needs of the impoverished, researching more on the socioeconomic conditions that influence public health in Ethiopia, and working to prevent self-destructive health behavior.

Sociomedical Sciences

Jillian Van Zee
Jillian graduated from Rhodes College with a B.S. in Neuroscience, where she studied abroad in South Africa, working at a public hospital on various health promotion activities.  After graduating, she joined the Peace Corps and spent two years in a rural village in Malawi working with the community as a Community Health Coordinator to design and implement health programs in order to increase access to health and education services.  With the local HIV/AIDS support organization, she built a Community Support Center to provide various HIV related resources. She also worked with Research Triangle Institute on the monitoring and evaluation of a pilot malaria program focused on indoor residual spraying as a prevention method.

Lensa Idossa
Lensa’s family moved from Ethiopia to the United States in the late 90s at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. She graduated from the University of Minnesota with a B.A in Psychology and a minor in Leadership, and has also worked as a community health educator in Minnesota and Ethiopia. Witnessing firsthand the devastation caused by the pandemic, Lensa knew very early on that she wanted to help in the fight against HIV/AIDS. She has become attuned to health disparities that exist not only in the United States, but abroad as well, specifically health disparities related to HIV/AIDS among women. During her time at Mailman, she would like to gain a better understanding of this and explore ways to combat the problem.

Laura Bartkowiak
Laura is interested in public health and prisons, largely due to from her interest in socioeconomic disparities and because public health seemed to her a vehicle for social justice. As an undergraduate, she examined how different communities defined and struggled with inequity. After being introduced to the global problem of prison conditions and the resulting communicable diseases, her interest solidified after a prisoners’ rights internship with a Cameroonian NGO, where she saw firsthand the intimate link between detainee and community health. This work convinced Laura that although local agents’ participation was vital to improving human rights, and thus public health, structural transparency and reform must complement these efforts. Laura hopes to research how prison and post-release health care might be better coordinated, as well as apply public health perspectives to policy recommendations concerning sentencing and prison reform in the US and abroad.

Kate Mosso
Kate’s first experiences in global health were as an intern with Interplast - an organization that provides free reconstructive surgery for people in resource-poor countries living with cleft lips, cleft pallets, or deforming burns. During her senior year as an undergraduate, she was part of a service-learning project that developed a nutrition education program for people affected by or infected with HIV. She worked with a Kenyan NGO to implement the project as three-day seminars in the Bungoma Region of western Kenya. Most recently, Kate worked with the International Center for AIDS Care and Treatment Programs (ICAP) with a focus on prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV and infant feeding where she developed a set of provider-training materials that could be easily adapted into culturally specific tools to achieve safer infant feeding in resource poor settings. She is interested in sustainable development and the social and cultural aspects of the HIV epidemic, and also enjoys program planning and implementation work.

Anna Oprescu
Anna sought opportunities to explore issues of urban poverty faced by the patients she met as a patient liaison in a Brooklyn hospital, and afterwards became a member of a short-term service project in Camden, NJ. As an extension of this work, she is now the director of a one-time HIV-testing initiative in Brooklyn geared towards shifting the stigma of getting tested among adolescents. Anna has visited Romania since she was seven, where she became aware of social injustice faced by Roma communities and HIV-infected youth. In summer 2009, she led a service project at Casa Doru—a residence and safe haven for HIV-infected youth in Bucharest—where she was able to put human faces to articles describing Romania’s HIV/AIDS prevalence and antiretroviral shortages. Anna aspires to undertake a career as a physician working with medically underserved and marginalized people, and wishes to study global health strategies that consider social, political, historical, and cultural dimensions that are crucial to improving community and global health.

Chloe Lewis
Chloe graduated from Swarthmore College in 2006 with a degree in Political Science, and completed the Health Careers Program at Harvard Extension School in 2009. Chloe spent the last three years serving as the Director of Health Education Programming for the TRIAD Trust - a non-profit organization that trains local leaders in the Nkomazi region of South Africa - to run innovative, culturally relevant, community based HIV/AIDS education and testing programs. Before joining TRIAD, she worked as a Junior Project Manager for Jensen+Partners, an architecture and construction management firm specializing in large-scale institutional facilities in the scientific sectors. Chloe would like to return to fieldwork and program design for specific communities, and is interested in learning more about how to address the socio-cultural vulnerabilities of these communities when faced with the rapid economic changes associated with globalization.

David Ettl
David first became interested in global health in 2006 while interning as a research assistant for the UCLA Program in Global Health where he had the opportunity to travel to South Africa and co-author an article analyzing the role of small and medium-sized South African businesses in combating HIV/AIDS. These experiences served as a catalyst for working in East Africa with a non-profit organization called Support for International Change to reduce the impact of HIV/AIDS in rural Tanzania through education, testing, stigma reduction, and providing services to those infected with HIV. As his career in global health progresses, David hopes to explore the modern infrastructure of health-based development aid, and find ways to boost its efficacy and sustainability.