Current Fellows

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 the program will focus on equity analysis and tie in his previous work on cost effectiveness evaluations and equitable financial protection at the Ministry of Health in Ethiopia. His goal is to develop a strong way to measure equity for a large number of interventions which can be applied in priority setting in low- and middle-income countries.

“As an undergraduate in Ethiopia, the training I had was also more focused on a community-based approach, including visiting people house to house and teaching people how to take care of their own health. My interests in health economics research started there. I have been on the same path for the last 12 years but continue to expand my  horizon.”

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 Institutes of Health/ National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIH/NIAID), and has served on the CEPI-NIH/NIAID Joint Steering Committee for Pan-coronavirus Vaccine Development. He is an active member of the Goerge W. Counts Interest Group of the Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA).

His research interests include the sustainable manufacturing of vaccines and other pharmaceutical countermeasures within low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to combat endemic and pre-emergent infectious diseases, including those with pandemic potential. He is also interested in innovative preclinical and clinical vaccine and immunotherapeutic drug development research, health economics and outcomes research, research into health disparities affecting marginalized communities, and novel approaches to managing chronic wounds in vulnerable populations. His Takemi project focuses on the manufacturing capabilities for vaccines on the African continent.

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 processes related to the recently developed Essential Package of Health Services in the country, she is interested in finding answers to questions such as: to what extent health (and other ministries) should focus on intersectoral policies to achieve health outcomes? What role should the health sector play in prioritizing, adopting, and implementing these policies? What kind of governance mechanisms can facilitate these processes across sectors? And which values, such as effectiveness, efficiency, equity or sustainability, or others, should guide these decisions?

His research for the fellowship will look at his previously done ethno-linguistic analysis of two ethnic groups in Ghana, the Ashanti and the Kasena, to try and understand their intergenerational constructions of health.

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 needed empirical evidence to guide infectious disease policy action and build local research and response capacity for both Nigeria and the West African region.  Abdullahi’s Takemi project focuses on evaluating population-level outcomes of the systematic rollout of Dolutegravir as the preferred drug of choice for HIV treatment in Nigeria. He aims to focus on virological and treatment outcomes together with characterizing the emerging patterns of drug resistance in the complex recombinants viral subtypes circulating in the region to inform optimized treatment and implementation action strategies.

His research experience focuses on the epidemiology of TB in the pastoral settings of Ethiopia, performing quantitative and qualitative research. His goal in the Takemi program is to investigate how community-based TB services from community extension workers can overcome accessibility barriers of TB diagnosis and treatment services in Ethiopia at district level.

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 patient loneliness in greater detail. As a Takemi Fellow, he aims to conduct an international comparison of social connections and social prescribing related to loneliness.

His research for the program is focused on examining the effectiveness of Japanese primary care for patients. By investigating in-home care services, day services, and short-stay services provided by care workers for care-dependent older patients who cannot come to the clinic, he hopes to see how those factors affect the mortality rate and the proportion of home deaths.

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 Program, Fareeda will examine different dimensions of knowledge and mental health literacy as moderators of the relationship between barriers to mental health help-seeking and actual mental health service use among the Palestinian minority in Israel.

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 promotion and policy (MPH) between 2011 and 2013 at the University of Missouri-Columbia on a Fulbright scholarship. After completing his master’s degree, he returned to Afghanistan and started advocating for cancer prevention and control in view of lack of cancer prevention and insufficient cancer control activities in the country. He founded Afghanistan Cancer Foundation (ACF) to advocate for cancer prevention and control.  As a result of successful advocacy efforts, Dr. Maihan established the Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment Project within the Ministry of Public Health in 2016 opening the first cancer center in the country. Subsequently, he established Afghanistan’s National Cancer Control Program (NCCP) in 2017 headed it till 2020.

Dr. Maihan is passionate about cancer prevention and control in Afghanistan and in other low-income and conflict affected countries. Considering the fact that there is limited research about cancer in Afghanistan, he will be working on country’s cancer research during the Takemi Fellowship. He hopes to highlight the cancer health disparity in low-income and conflicted affected countries such as in Afghanistan.

“Inequity exits in cancer prevention and control, especially in low-income and conflict affected communities and settings. Donor agencies and implementing organizations need to urgently address this issue regardless of any type of affiliations. I hope to highlight this issue through my work and research.”

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, such as those working in the crowd and sharing economy. She hopes to obtain evidence of different workers’ health and determine how to connect the scientific evidence to policy development.

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 to improve health. During the program, he hopes to build effective strategies for disease control and prevention with a focus on low- and middle-income countries.