Dr. Maihan Abdullah
Maihan Abdullah (Afghanistan), PhD, completed his medical school in Afghanistan at Kandahar University in 2006. He started general surgery residency in 2007 in one of the teaching hospitals in Kabul. During his residency program, he realized the social, political, and economic determinants of health as well as the barriers to seeking healthcare among Afghans, especially among his patients. He decided to address these issues through public health. He studied health…
Dr. Adam Abdullahi
Adam Abdullahi (Nigeria), PhD, is currently a Cambridge-Africa Research Fellow at University of Cambridge and a junior research faculty at the Institute of Human Virology Nigeria. His current research interests include the dynamics of immune responses to vaccination and exposure to emerging infectious diseases across African populations, including characterizing pre-existing population-level immunological determinants of the less severe outcomes observed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Abdullahi’s overall work focuses on generating critically…
Dr. Fareeda Abo-Rass
Fareeda Abo-Rass (Palestinian), MSW, PhD, is a Palestinian-Arab social worker and researcher. Currently, she is a postdoctoral fellow at the school for social work at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Abo-Rass’s research focuses on the psychosocial aspects of mental health among the Palestinian minority in Israel, specifically knowledge and mental health literacy, subjective beliefs, and attitudes, and their relationship to health outcomes and behaviors. During her fellowship at the Takemi…
Dr. Wafa Aftab
Wafa Aftab (Pakistan), MD, is a medical doctor from Pakistan with training in internal medicine. Currently, she is pursuing a PhD at University of Bergen in Norway at the Bergen Center for Ethics and Priority Setting (BCEPS). Aftab’s research focuses on population health from an intersectoral policy perspective. For her Takemi project, she is conducting in-depth interviews with policymakers from health and other sectors in Pakistan. Focusing on the policy…
Dr. Christopher da Costa
Christopher (“Chris”) da Costa (The Gambia), MD, PhD, is U.S.-licensed board-certified physician, infectious disease immunologist, and vaccine and immunotherapeutics development subject matter expert. As CEPI’s Disease Program Leader for development of broadly protective coronavirus (‘pan-coronavirus”) vaccines, he has worked in close collaboration with partnering organizations that include the World Health Organization (WHO), Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy (CIDRAP), and the National…
Dr. Alemayehu Hailu
Alemayehu Hailu (Ethiopia) is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bergen in Norway and a health economics consultant for the WHO NCD Department. While working as a senior health economics advisor in Ethiopia, he began working at the Bergen Centre for Ethics and Priority Setting at the University of Bergen, Norway. For many years he also taught at the School of Public Health in Ethiopia. His research for…
Dr. Mariko Inoue
Mariko Inoue (Japan), PhD, is an epidemiologist and an associate professor at the School of Public Health, Teikyo University in Japan. Her research interests center on social determinants of health, with a particular focus on the health of workers in precarious employment and newly developed and traditional sole entrepreneurs. Her research for the Takemi Program is an epidemiological study of workers’ health among regular employees, non-regular employees, and gig workers,…
Dr. Arnaud Iradukunda
Arnaud Iradukunda (Burundi), MD, is a statistician from Lake Tanganyika University with a background in bioethics for research and human rights, as well as a medical doctor at Kamenge Teaching Hospital (University of Burundi). Iradukunda’s key interests lie in international health, clinical data analysis, data science for diseases modeling, system thinking, and dynamics modeling. As a Takemi Fellow, Iradukunda intends to examine problems of mobilizing, allocating, and managing scarce resources…
Dr. Kazutaka Yoshida
Kazutaka Yoshida (Japan), PhD, is a family physician in Japan and a postdoctoral researcher at Fukushima Medical University (FMU). His research focuses on the need for healthcare professionals in primary health care to pay more attention to social determinants of health such as loneliness and to practice social prescribing by involving families and community resources. Currently, he collaborates with a nurse-researcher and is investigating family physicians’ and nurses’ perceptions of…