Michelle Olakkengil recently received her Master of Science in Global Health and Population from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. During her studies, Michelle worked on professional projects for governments and non-profit organizations. With D-tree International, she evaluated the heterogeneity of programmatic impact of an mHealth intervention across different sub-populations of postpartum women in Zanzibar, Tanzania. Before this, Michelle served as a Policy Research Consultant for the Planning & Development Commission of Ethiopia, providing recommendations on the adoption and integration of a multi-dimensional poverty index that robustly assessed socioeconomic depravity within the country using globally-defined measures. She has also collaborated on a UNFPA-funded project for the Nepalese government to develop performance indicators and analyze health care quality and expenditure data in an effort to better characterize the landscape of reproductive health financing in the country for national and local monitoring and evaluation efforts. Currently, Michelle serves as a Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. Agency for International Development and will be heading to West Africa for her first overseas assignment next year.
