INDIA
Varsha Dhurde, PhD, MS
LMIC Fellow
Dr. Dhurde will spend her fellowship year at Lata Medical Research Foundation in Nagpur under the mentorship of Archana Patel, MD, PhD and Patricia Hibberd, MD, PhD. Her research will focus on estimating the prevalence of anemia and coverage of adolescent anemia control programs among girls aged 15-19 years in Nagpur District, India. Dr. Dhurde completed her masters and doctorate from Savitribai Phule Pune University in 2007. She has extensive experience in health and nutrition research and is passionate about nutrition research.
Nikhil Venkateshmurthy, MD
LMIC Fellow
Dr. Srinivasapura Venkateshmurthy will spend his fellowship year at the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) in Gurgaon under the mentorship of Mark Huffman, MD, MPH. His research will focus on assessing the context and factors crucial for scale-up of an innovative strategy to address hypertension and diabetes in India. . Dr. Srinivasapura Venkateshmurthy completed an MD in Community Medicine from All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi in 2013. Soon after he joined PHFI and is based in Visakhapatnam, India. He plays a dual role of an administrator and a researcher. He leads a team of 49 people and is responsible for the implementation of three distinct research projects aiming to address the growing burden of non-communicable diseases in India. Over the course of six years, he has established research infrastructure, recruited and trained project personnel, built rapport with community stakeholders and liaised with health department officials. Dr. Srinivasapura Venkateshmurthy ‘s primary area of interest is implementation science. He plans to develop into a well-rounded public health researcher, with a specific interest in the context and fidelity of program implementation.
KENYA
Angela Achieng, PhD, MSc
LMIC Fellow
Dr. Achieng will spend her fellowship year at the Center for Global Health Research in Kisumu under the mentorship of DJ Perkins, Collins Ouma. Her research will focus on targeting the LAIR1 pathway for development of novel therapeutics in pediatric severe malarial anemia in in Kenya. Dr. Achieng completed her doctoral training in medical immunology at Maseno University, Kisumu, Kenya in April 2019 on a Global Infectious Diseases training grant. She also holds Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in Biochemistry and molecular biology from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology and Maseno University, respectively. Prior to her doctoral training, Dr. Achieng worked for the United States Army Medical Research Unit-Kenya and carried out molecular surveillance for anti-malarial drug resistance in Kenyan Plasmodium falciparum isolates.
While pursuing her PhD, Dr. Achieng characterized the role of leukocyte receptors in conditioning susceptibility to pediatric severe malarial anemia, and also identified novel compounds with anti-plasmodial activity. These and other related research findings have enabled her to publish 13 manuscripts and give presentations at major international scientific meetings. Her career goal is to become an independent scientist and leader in development of immunotherapies for the treatment of malaria and other infectious diseases.
NIGERIA
Ola Oladimeji, PhD, MBBS, MPA, MSc
LMIC Fellow
Dr. Oladimeji will spend his fellowship year at the University of Jos in Jos under the mentorship of C. Robert Horsburgh, Jr., MD, Ayuba I Zoakah, MBBS, MPH, FWACP and Tom N Achiki, MD, MPH, MBA, PhD. His research will focus on exploring the treatment outcome of drug resistant tuberculosis and transmission risk among patients with and without HIV infection in Nigeria. Dr. Oladimeji completed his MBBS and master’s degrees at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He received his doctoral degree in public health from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He also completed the one year Global Clinical Scholars Research Training (GCSRT) Program in Clinical Trials concentration from Harvard Medical School. Dr. Oladimeji was instrumental to the initiation and expansion of programmatic management of MDR-TB in Nigeria. He served as a consultant to STOP TB Partnership in Geneva. He is a member of America Thoracic Society (ATS) and affiliated collaborator with the Global Burden of Disease research team at the University of Washington. Dr. Oladimeji has honorary affiliations with Walter Sisulu University, Eastern Cape, South Africa and School of Public Health, University of Namibia, Namibia.
PERU
Roxana Garcia, MD, MP
U.S. Fellow
Dr. Garcia will spend her fellowship year at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia (UPCH) in Lima under the mentorship of Patricia Garcia, MD, PhD, MPH and Mamta Swaroop, MD. Her research will focus on evaluating the neurosurgical capacity for traumatic brain injury in Peru. Dr. Garcia was born in California and is entering her sixth year of neurosurgery residency at Northwestern University. She completed her medical training at UCSF and two master’s degrees from the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. Dr. Garcia hopes to develop a career in global neurosurgery, working on improving access to surgical care in Latin America with a special interest in traumatic brain injury. Dr. Garcia was awarded the Bernard Osher Foundation grant early in medical school, and has published 15 manuscripts since starting residency in 2014. She completed an NIH StrokeNet Research Fellowship this year examining disparities in access to stroke care. Dr. Garcia is excited to be a 2019-2020 Fogarty Global Health Trainee and looks forward to collaborating on many global health projects in the future.
RWANDA
Elizabeth Louis, PhD, MA
U.S. Fellow
Dr. Louis will spend her fellowship year at the University of Global Health Equity (UGHE) in Kigaliis under the mentorship of Giuseppe Raviola, MD and David Henderson, MD. Her research will focus on expanding community health workers and nontraditional gatekeepers in mental health settings in Rwanda. Dr. Louis, earned her doctoral degree in Counseling Psychology at the University of Georgia. She is currently completing her psychology internship with the Center for Multicultural Training in Psychology at the Boston University School of Medicine – Boston Medical Center. As a HaitianAmerican, her cultural roots influence her clinical and research interests. Dr. Louis has presented her scholarly work at international conferrers in Canada, Portugal, South Africa, Jamaica, Haiti, and Japan. Dr. Louis is the recipient of The National Security Education Program David L. Boren Fellowship (Haiti), American Psychological Association Minority Fellow Program, The American Association of University Women, Alternate – American Dissertation Fellowship Program, and the Georgia Psychological Association’s Diversity Student Award.
SOUTH AFRICA
Andrew Kim, MA
U.S. Fellow
Mr. Kim will spend his fellowship year at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg under the mentorship of Shane Norris, PhD and Christopher Kuzawa, PhD. His research will focus on he intergenerational effects of apartheid-based prenatal stress on birth outcomes, neuroendocrine function, and mental illness risk across subsequent generations using a longitudinal birth cohort study based in Soweto, South Africa. Mr. Kim is a PhD candidate in biological anthropology at Northwestern University. As a mixed-methods researcher trained in statistical, ethnographic, and laboratory methods, Mr. Kim has published in a wide array of journals including Scientific Reports, Transcultural Psychiatry, and International Health. Mr. Kim is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and his research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
Josh Murphy, MPH
U.S. Fellow
Mr. Murphy will spend his fellowship year at the Health Economics and Epidemiology Research Office (HERO) in Johannesburg under the mentorship of Sophie Pascoe, PhD, Chodziwadziwa Kabudula, PhD and Matthew Fox, DSc. His research will focus on matching patient records across non-networked databases to determine loss to care and patterns of patient mobility at facilities in the public sector of HIV program in Johannesburg, South Africa. Mr. Murphy joined HE2RO in October 2015 as a Research Project Manager on the Evaluation of National Adherence Guidelines in South Africa. He is a behavioral scientist with over 10 years of experience in public health program implementation as well as quantitative and qualitative research. He holds a BA in Psychology from Tufts University and a master’s degree in Public Health from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Prior to joining HE2RO, Mr. Murphy worked for the Anova Health Institute as Strategic Information Manager. His interests include data visualization and increasing data use at all levels of the health system. He hopes to utilize his expertise to teach at the university level someday.
Cheryl Hendrickson, MPH
U.S. Fellow
Ms. Hendrickson will spend her fellowship year at the Health Economics and Epidemiology Research Office (HERO) in Johannesburg under the mentorship of Brooke Nichols, PhD, Matthew Fox, DSc and Lawrence Long, PhD. Her research will focus on HIV, from basic science research into the immunological mechanisms responsible for the spontaneous control of HIV infection in ‘elite controllers’ to developing an algorithm used to estimate HIVpositive patients antiretroviral start date using routinely collected laboratory data. Ms. Hendrickson’s education and training, in both the U.S. and southern Africa, has been in the biomedical sciences and epidemiology, specifically on infectious disease and sexual & reproductive health. She holds a Master’s in Public Health from Boston University and is currently pursuing her PhD at Erasmus MC (The Netherlands). In addition to her HIV research interests, Ms. Hendrickson is also passionate about sexual and reproductive health issues and is currently part of a team at the Health Economics and Epidemiology Research Office that is assessing women’s access to safe sexual and reproductive health services in South Africa. Her PhD is focusing on evaluating the routine implementation of pre-exposure prophylaxis in South Africa and Zambia.
TANZANIA
Caleb Figge, PhD, MA
U.S. Fellow
Dr. Figge will spend his fellowship year at Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences (MUHAS) in Dar es Salaam, under the mentorship of Sylvia Kaaya, MD, PhD and Mary Kay Smith-Fawzi, ScD. His research will focus on local expressions of posttraumatic distress to augment and validate measures of psychopathology and adaptive functioning in traumaaffected Tanzanian youth. The project will result in several contextually-validated measures to inform screening, diagnosis, and treatment of Tanzanian youth across hospital, school, and mental health settings. Dr. Figge received his PhD in Clinical-Child Psychology from DePaul University in Chicago, and completed his predoctoral clinical internship at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. His research program has focused on child trauma and posttraumatic stress in urban, at-risk contexts in the United States and in rural Cambodia, which has earned him several research awards. Dr. Figge has clinical experience in pediatric psychology, community mental health, and international mental health programming. He is looking forward to growing his research program in global mental health.
UGANDA
Pooja Chitneni, MD
U.S. Fellow
Dr. Chitneni will spend her fellowship year at the Mbarara University of Science and Technology in Mbarara under the mentorship of Lynn Matthews, MD, MPH, Jessica Haberer, MD, MS and Dr. Bosco Bwana, MBChB, MPH. Her research will focus on assessing sexually transmitted infection epidemiology and partner notification practices among men and women affected by HIV. Dr. Chitneni received her medical degree from the University of Iowa in 2012, completed her internal medicine residency training from Boston Medical Center in 2015, and completed her infectious diseases fellowship from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital in 2018. She has lived and worked in Mbarara, Uganda since January 2018, previously supported by a NIAID T32 training grant. Dr. Chitneni eventually hopes to develop interventions to curb vertical and horizontal STI transmission among Ugandans couples. Dr. Chitneni is very excited and grateful for the Fogarty Fellowship to be able to continue her research in Uganda.