Senior Leadership Fellows

• This program offers a rare opportunity for those who have recently served in top-level positions in government, multilateral institutions, non-profit organizations, and journalism to spend three months at Harvard School of Public Health to share leadership vision and experiences via mentoring and teaching of students who aspire to similar roles. One domestic and one international Senior Leadership Fellow will be invited to participate each semester. Senior Leadership Fellows interact with Harvard faculty and participate in campus life at the School and University. Two fellowships are offered:

The Gro Harlem Brundtland Senior Leadership Fellows Program is international and focuses on international leadership issues.

The Richard L. and Ronay A. Menschel Senior Leadership Fellows Program focuses both on domestic and international leadership issues.

MEET THE FELLOWS of SPRING 2013:

Two Richard M. and Ronay A. Menschel Senior Leadership Fellows will be joining the Division of Policy Translation and Leadership Development for spring 2013.

JudyAnn Bigby, M.D. served as Secretary of Health and Human Services for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. She will be leading an eight-week independent study group called Lessons in Leadership: Developing a Population Based Approach to Health and Human Services Delivery.

As Secretary of Health and Human Services, Dr. Bigby was responsible for implementing many aspects of the 2006 Massachusetts health care reform law.  Massachusetts achieved a nation leading health insurance coverage rate of 98% of adults and 99.8% of children.  Dr. Bigby worked to achieve higher quality of health care and better health for Massachusetts residents while leading Governor Deval Patrick’s efforts to address the high cost of health care.  Her efforts have made the Commonwealth of Massachusetts one of the nation’s leading states in forging efforts to reform health care delivery systems to build a strong primary care foundation, integrate service delivery, and reform payment based on outcomes including for the most vulnerable populations with disabilities, chronic mental illness, and the frail elderly.   Prior to her appointment as Secretary, Dr. Bigby served as the Director of Community Health Programs at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and as the Director of the Center of Excellence in Women’s Health at Harvard Medical School.  She has pioneered work to eliminate health disparities among low-income and minority women through the design of clinical programs, education of health professionals, and community based research in areas such as breast and cervical cancer mortality.  She practiced primary care internal medicine, specializing in women’s health, for more than 25 years.   Dr. Bigby is a member of the Board of Directors of the National Quality Forum.  In 2011 President Obama appointed her as one of the inaugural members of the Advisory Group on Prevention, Health Promotion, and Integrative and Public Health of the National Prevention, Health Promotion and Public Health Council.  Dr. Bigby holds a BA from Wellesley College and an MD from Harvard Medical School.

Ashok Alexander led the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s India office from its inception in 2003, until 2012.  There, he created Avahan, the Gates Foundation’s flagship India AIDS prevention program. At HSPH he will teach a course in Global Health and Population titled Scaling Up Public Health Delivery for Impact: Lessons in Leadership.

Avahan became the largest private prevention program ever undertaken in HIV/AIDS.  It worked with groups most at risk to HIV – primarily men and women involved in commercial sex work, and their clients.  Avahan was driven by a passionate team drawn mainly from the private sector, with no prior experience in public health, backed by strong technical support.  This team scaled up Avahan across six states in India, within three years. This meant a complex virtual organization with many partners and government, the hard and soft infrastructure for service delivery, and sustainability by program transition to government. Avahan also rolled out community led prevention in more than 500 towns in the six states, and across the national highway system. Avahan showed how business thinking could be used to scale up public health delivery.

Over a decade, Mr. Alexander led the growth and expansion of the Gates Foundation’s first country office, with grants spanning health, sanitation and agriculture. The portfolio of grants that he oversaw amounted to over $1 billion across India, involving scores of grantee organizations. Mr. Alexander came to the Gates Foundation with 24 years of experience in the private sector working in Hong Kong, the United States and in India.

Prior to joining the foundation, he was a Director in McKinsey and Company and head of the consulting firm’s New Delhi office.  Mr. Alexander is a graduate of St Stephens College in New Delhi and has a post-graduate degree from the Delhi School of Economics, and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad.   He is a founding board member of the Public Health Foundation of India. He also serves on the board of CARE India, and is a founding trustee of the America-India Foundation.

FALL 2012 FELLOWS:

Adrienne Germain

Adrienne Germain, President Emerita of the International Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC) is a widely recognized architect of the international movement for women’s health and human rights. She has led IWHC’s work on international health and population policy with the UN, governments and NGOs especially in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and has provided sustained support for the building of women’s health and rights organizations in several low-income countries. In June, 2012, Ms. Germain received the United Nations Population Award in recognition of her lifetime work. Ms. Germain holds a B.A. from Wellesley College (1969), an M.A. in sociology and demography from the University of California at Berkeley, and an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Bard College. In November 2012, Ms. Germain was a Menschel Senior Leadership Fellow in the Division of Policy Translation and Leadership Development at Harvard School of Public Health.

David Homeli Mwakyusa

Professor David Homeli Mwakyusa has an established background in medicine, politics and academia. He completed fellowships in gastroenterology in Scotland and the United States, and served as the director of administration and hospital services at Muhimbili, the national hospital of Tanzania. He serves as Professor and was chair of the department of internal medicine at the Dar es Salaam University Medical School. Professor Mwakyusa was elected to Parliament in 2000 and is currently serving his third term, presently Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture, Livestock and Water. As Minister for Health and Social Welfare for five years, he oversaw improvements in malaria, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and child health and pioneered the Primary Health Services Programme which is credited for revolutionizing health care in Tanzania. For fall of 2012, he was a Brundtland Senior Leadership Fellow at Harvard School of Public Health.

SPRING 2012 FELLOWS:

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  K. Sujatha Rao

  With more than 35 years of experience in the Indian Administrative Service, K. Sujatha Rao served as Union Secretary, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare for the government of India until 2010 where she was involved in all aspects of the health sector.

  She was nominated as Member Secretary of the National Commission on Macroeconomics in 2004, and went on to become Director General of the National AIDS Control Organization (NACO) from 2006-2009, where she was instrumental in establishing systems and building up NACO with a capacity to implement programs with a five-fold budget increase. As Union Secretary of Health and Family Welfare, Ms. Rao was involved in the first ever national program for noncommunicable diseases; the process for a national policy for use of antibiotics; and introducing vaccines in public health. She has represented India on boards of the WHO, Global Fund and UNAIDS. Ms. Rao did her post-graduate work at Delhi University and has a Master’s Degree in Public Administration from Harvard University, where she was a Mason Fellow (1990), and a Takemi Fellow for International Health at Harvard School of Public Health (1993). She was the first Gro Harlem Brundtland Senior Leadership Fellow at Harvard School of Public Health, in Spring of 2012.