Bixby Center » People

Virgina Gidi

kate bedford — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 14:23:08 +0000

Virginia (Ginny) Gidi is currently a 3rd year student in the Doctor of Public Health (DrPH). She received her BA in Spanish and Latin American/Caribbean Studies and her MPH in Health Management from the University of Michigan. After graduation, Ginny spent 6 years working in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Global Health Affairs, serving as the Senior International Health Officer for Latin America. In 2005 she accepted a job with the Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator (OGAC) as the Regional Team Leader for Latin America and the Caribbean to coordinate President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) activities in the region. It was her work on PEPFAR that prompted Ginny to return to her interests in health systems development. Through her doctoral research, she hopes to explore how health systems can be better oriented to adapt to the growing burden of chronic disease. Specifically, she is examining the national health system responses to HIV/AIDS and diabetes mellitus in Mexico and Brazil and examining the policy lessons learned that could be applied to other developing or developed countries.

Sunny Bai

kate bedford — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:41:26 +0000

PH 181 Graduate Student Instructor
Sunny is currently in her 2^nd year in Maternal and Child Health MPH program. She graduated from UCLA in June 2008, with a Bachelors of Science degree in Physiological Sciences. She hopes to study factors that affect the health of infants in underserved communities. During her undergraduate career, Sunny as a Resident Assistant for two years, worked with infants as an intern in the Psychology Department’s Infant Development Program, and researched cardiac diseases. She also worked with underserved children in South Africa.

Kathryn Stewart

kate bedford — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:26:32 +0000

PH 181 Graduate Student Instructor

Kathryn Stewart graduated from Scripps College in Claremont, California in 1999 with a BA in Politics and International Relations. Kathryn spent a summer working at the Population Council in Mexico City, where she did research for her senior thesis focusing on abortion politics in Mexico. Shortly after graduation, Kathryn joined the Peace Corps and served as a Rural Health Volunteer and Volunteer Leader in Cote D’Ivoire. Her work focused primarily on pre-natal and infant health as well as HIV/AIDS education. Her service was cut short by civil unrest that resulted in the evacuation of all Peace Corps Volunteers from the country. Kathryn has spent the last two years doing reproductive and sexual health research for the Guttmacher Institute in New York. She is pursuing a dual degree in Public Health and Policy Policy.

Andrew Anglemyer, MPH

kate bedford — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:24:05 +0000

PH 181 Graduate Student Instructor

After serving 5 years in the US Army, Andy graduated from UC Berkeley with a major in Slavic Languages and Literatures and a minor in Serbo-Croatian. In 2006 he finished his MPH in Epi/Biostats at UC Berkeley; the title of his thesis was “Predictors of HIV Among Men Who Have Sex With Men in Mexicali, Mexico”. Currently he is working for Dr. Jack Colford on California Pediatrics AIDS data and will be applying causal inference techniques such as marginal structural models and propensity scores to these data in his research

Caitlin Gerdts, MHS

kate bedford — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:16:27 +0000

Caitlin Gerdts is a doctoral student in the UC Berkeley department of Epidemiology. After spending three years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador working in family planning and intimate partner violence, Caitlin went on to earn her MHS in population, family and reproductive health from The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. As a program officer at the Pacific Institute for Women’s Health, Caitlin directed the Institutes’ reproductive rights advocacy efforts in Latin America and California. Later as a research analyst for the Women’s Global Health Imperative, Caitlin worked on large scale clinical trials in gender and reproductive health in Southern Africa. As a doctoral student she hopes to pursue her interest in social and behavioral determinants of health—specifically gender and reproductive health. She is currently working with Dr. Prata and her team at the Bixby Center.

Amita Sreenivas, MPH

admin — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 06:34:03 +0000

Amita Sreenivas graduated with an MPH from UC Berkeley in maternal-child/international health. She was a pre-medical student at The George Washington University but decided to pursue a career in public health instead following experiences of volunteering in the US and internationally. Among those experiences include conducting survey work in nine urban slums of Hyderabad (India), qualitative research on barriers to accessing healthcare among postpartum women in rural Shankarpally (India), implementing an evaluation for the National Breastfeeding Association of Timor L’este and formative research on traditional infant feeding practices and delivery norms among Timorese women. After receiving her masters in public health, she spent a year working as a family planning counselor in Seattle, WA. In October of 2007, she joined the UCB Bixby group as an Associate Specialist in International Maternal Health. In the future, she would like to become a CNM and continue her work in health systems strengthening as it relates to the reproductive health of vulnerable populations in Asia and Africa.
sreenivas@berkeley.edu

Ndola Prata, MD, MSc

admin — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 06:29:45 +0000

Ndola Prata is a physician and medical demographer from Angola. She is an Assistant Adjunct Professor of Maternal and Child Health in the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley and also serves as the Scientific Director in the Bixby Center for Population, Health and Sustainability and the Medical Director of Venture Strategies for Health and Development. After practicing medicine in Angola for 10 years and serving as Head of the Social Statistics Department at the National Institute of Statistics of Angola, she received an MSc in medical demography from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. After moving to the USA, she spent five years as a Demographer/Analyst for CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health. Though Dr. Prata’s current research focuses primarily in sub-Saharan Africa, she is also heading research projects in South Asia, and has led operations research in Latin America, Central Asia and South America in the recent past. Much of her work has been focused on the expansion of use of misoprostol to control postpartum hemorrhage, the leading cause of maternal mortality worldwide. In addition, she is currently heading a community-based study in Ethiopia investigating the efficacy and preferred choice of provider for injectable contraceptives. Dr. Prata has published extensively in areas of family planning, financing and ability to pay for reproductive health programs, the role of the private sector in health care in developing countries, adolescent sexual behavior in developing countries, priorities for maternal health and the use of misoprostol to manage postpartum bleeding.
ndola@berkeley.edu

Daniel Perlman, PhD

admin — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 06:28:47 +0000

Daniel Perlman, Ph.D., a research medical anthropologist at the Bixby Center, has more than twenty years experience planning, implementing, and evaluating primary health care programs in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. His graduate courses at the School of Public Health include qualitative research methods, the social dimensions of international health, and the ethics of international health research. Daniel is currently co-directing the Bixby-FIC Population and Health Program in Nigeria with Dr. Potts. He co-edited The Practice of International Health, Oxford University Press.
dperl@uclink.berkeley.edu

Paige Passano, MPH

admin — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 06:27:34 +0000

Paige Passano completed her MPH in International Public Health in New Orleans at the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in 2002.

From 2003-2007, she worked for Population Services International (PSI) in Mumbai, India. At PSI, she designed outreach materials for the Bombay Sex Workers Project and led The MSM Initiative, a street-based intervention focused on risk reduction for gay and bisexual men and the transgender community.

Her current research interests lie in developing strategies to mobilize underserved communities and frontline healthcare workers to overcome structural and socio-cultural barriers to family planning, safe abortion, and emergency obstetric care.

She joined the Bixby Center in 2007 as an Associate Specialist in Global Maternal Health.

paigepassano.bixby@gmail.com

Claire Norris, MPA

admin — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 06:23:14 +0000

Claire Norris is the Administrator for the Bixby Center and also coordinates the activities of the Global Health Office. She has over 25 years experience in nonprofit and university settings. Claire received her Masters in Public Administration from Golden Gate University, San Francisco, with a dual emphasis in Health Care Administration and Administrative Organization and Management.
cnorris@berkeley.edu