Funded by the Merck Foundation, this fellowship provides up to three years of financial and professional support to pre-doctoral candidates in the Department of Epidemiology. The criteria used to select the winners are based on need, academic merit and letters of recommendations. Two alumnae from the Department of Epidemiology who now work at Merck, Jean Marie Arduino and Carolyn Cannuscio, helped to develop the fellowship.

The pre-doctoral candidates supported by the Merck Fellowship are:

Sonia Mathews, who received her SM degree in epidemiology from HSPH and is currently working toward her doctoral degree. Her research interest is in modifiable risk factors in the areas of mental health, physical activity and diet as they impact cancer.

Kunjal Patel, who received her MPH from Yale University School of Medicine, where she focused on infectious disease epidemiology. Currently in her third year as a doctoral student at HSPH, Patel is researching issues related to HIV/AIDS.

Virginia Pitzer, who received her AB degree from Princeton University and worked as a fellow in emerging infectious disease laboratory training at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Boston Schweitzer Fellowships

Two HSPH students have been awarded 2003-2004 Boston Schweitzer Fellowships. They are among 130 fellows selected in six programs located in Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, New Hampshire/Vermont, North Carolina and Pittsburgh.

The fellows design and carry out health-related community service projects to assist individuals or communities that lack adequate health services.

Each fellow works with a local agency providing at least 200 hours of service with the support of a mentor at their community sites and a mentor at their schools.

Jennifer Cavallari, MS2–Environmental Health, is working with MassCOSH and the Assist the Workers Resource Network Campaign by performing an assessment of work-related health and safety needs and creating literature for workers on occupational health and safety.

Lindsay Rosenfeld, MS2–Health and Social Behavior, is working with La Alianza Hispana and other organizations to train professionals at multiservice organizations and community health centers on health literacy and to help develop literature at appropriate reading levels for their clients.

David E. Bell Fellows in Population and Development

This program, based at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, provides leadership training and development for scholars, managers and policymakers in academic, public and non-governmental organizations working in the field of population and development.

Fauzia Ahmed, a resident scholar in the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, comes to the Center with 25 years of experience with development programs and policies for low-income families in a variety of countries, including India, Indonesia, Thailand and her native Bangladesh. During her fellowship, she will write a book based upon her recent doctoral dissertation, "Low-Income Progressive Men: Microcredit, Gender Empowerment and the Redefinition of Manhood in Rural Bangladesh."

Jesica Gómez-Jauregui Abdó is a health economist and an associate researcher in health systems with the National Institute of Public Health in Mexico. During her fellowship, she will prepare an evaluation of the equity and fairness of reproductive health policies in Mexico.

Roland Pongou is a social science mathematician and demographer from the Université Catholique de Louvain, Institut de Démographie, Belgium. He received his MSc in social science mathematics and his BS in pure mathematics from the University of Yaounde in Cameroon. His fellowship research will examine the socio-cultural and economic determinants of nutritional health of children under the age of three in Cameroon.

Ilavenil Ramiah holds a PhD in economic sociology and international political economy from Cambridge University in the United Kingdom and an MSc in international relations from the London School of Economics. As a Bell Fellow, Ramiah will analyze the development of the African Comprehensive HIV/AIDS Partnerships (ACHAP) in Botswana. The study will seek lessons about public-private partnerships in public health and the strategies for addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa.

Xiaoming Sun is director and associate professor at the Research Institute of Population and Health, Nanjing College for Population Program Management in the People’s Republic of China. A medical doctor with nearly 20 years of experience in population research, Sun plans to use his fellowship to prepare an in-depth evaluation of the interaction between China’s reproductive health and family planning services since China’s commitment to the Cairo Conference.

Mortimer Spiegelman Fellows in Demography and Population Studies

This program, as well as the Saltonstall Population Innovation Fund described below, supports innovative graduate work in the field of demography and population studies. They are both based at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies.

Elizabeth Oliveras is a doctoral student in the Department of Population and International Health. She is using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to explore women’s access to and use of abortion services in Accra, Ghana. She will use focus group discussions to explore women’s beliefs about the safety and availability of services; this will complement a quantitative analysis that uses survey data to determine which groups of women are likely to use safe versus unsafe abortion services.

Rebecca Thornton is a doctoral student in political economy and development, an interdisciplinary program between the Kennedy School of Government and the Harvard Economics Department. Her recent work is related to household and individual decision-making, with regards to fertility, marriage, and immigration. Her proposed fellowship research will explore the links between ethnic diversity, religion, and HIV/AIDS, as it relates to individual behavior and sexual choices One hypothesis is that the more diverse a community, the slower the rate of transmission of the virus due to preferences for similar ethnic groups and the barriers that ethnicity may have in slowing transmission rates.

Saltonstall Population Innovation Fund Graduate Associates

Solange Baptiste is a second year master’s student in the Department of Population and International Health at HSPH. She will conduct a preliminary qualitative study on the broad socio-cultural context within which high-risk sexual behavior occurs for a population of Tanzanian women who work in bars and hotels. Baptiste has been invited to participate as a researcher in a prospective study in Moshi, Tanzania, because of her particular interest in the design of HIV interventions (programmatic and policy level) for vulnerable populations in developing countries.

James Habyarimana is a graduate student in the Department of Economics at Harvard University. His research project is entitled "Estimating the impact of schooling on fertility in Zambia: Evidence using the political economy of education provision in the pre- and post-independence eras." The project aims to determine the impact of female schooling on fertility by examining the transition to majority rule in a settler-dominated colony and its association with increases in schooling of subsequent cohorts.

Tisha Mitsunaga is a second year masters student in the Department of Population and International Health at HSPH. Mitsunaga worked with the Ministry of Health in Botswana during the 2003 summer semester to develop a monitoring and evaluation framework for "Masa," the national anti-retroviral (ARV) therapy program. She hopes to continue working with the ARV team to further refine and implement the framework, and will examine her findings and associated challenges in her thesis.

Arjumand Siddiqi is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Society, Human Development, and Health. Using a "varieties of capitalism" approach, her dissertation employs multilevel analysis to explore the role of income inequality, and other political economy factors, in supporting child development among the OECD nations. She will focus on cognitive and social development outcomes, advancing the notion that both outcomes provide returns to individual children, but also provide massive returns to society in the forms of human capital and social capital.