The Bixby Center works with a number of affiliates from within UC Berkeley as well as external organizations and partners.
Dr. Colette (Coco) Auerswald is an Associate Professor of Health and Social Behavior and Director of the MS Degree for the UCB-UCSF Joint Medical Program and the Director of the Innovations 4 Youth Research Center. Her research focuses on the social determinants of health for youth and structural interventions to improve adolescent health through communitycollaborations and youth-engaged approaches.
Dr. Julianna Deardorff is the Director of the Center of Excellence in MCAH and the MCAH MPH Program. Her research focuses on pubertal development, sexual and reproductive health during adolescence and young adulthood, mental health, particularly among young Latinos in the US.
Dr. Kim Harley is the Faculty Director of the Wallace Center for MCAH and Associate Adjunct Professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. Dr. Harley’s research focuses on utilizing community-based participatory methods and novel research technologies (e.g., sensors, wearables) to measure environmental exposures. She is also interested in using technology to conduct research on maternal and reproductive health outcomes.
Dr. Nuriye Nalan Sahin Hodoglugil is a physician working in global reproductive health with many years of experience in academia, public sector, international health organizations and non-governmental organizations. She led global health programs and research in the areas of family planning, sexually transmitted diseases, HIV prevention, women’s reproductive rights and maternal health. She currently works as the Associate Medical Director of VSI, providing technical leadership for maternal mortality reduction programs in sub-Saharan Africa. She is a Bixby Associate Fellow.
Sarah Jane Holcombe, PhD, MPH, MPPM is currently an Associate Fellow at the Bixby Center at the University of California, Berkeley. She began her career in public health with the Population and Community Development Association in Bangkok, Thailand, where she helped develop proposals and evaluate programs addressing the developing HIV/AIDS epidemic. Subsequently, at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, she contributed to development of measures of quality for health programs serving low-income populations as well as analyzed allied financing strategies. She has designed and led grant-making programs for reproductive health advocacy and services in Ethiopia, Mexico, and Sudan with the Packard Foundation, and developed and launched an East Africa grant-making program supporting community based provision of reproductive health services for the Bergstrom Foundation. She also directed and helped develop the Ellertson Postdoctoral Fellowship in Abortion and Reproductive Health.
Robert (Nap) Hosang, MD MPH MBA FRCOG FACOG is the inaugural director of the online (hybrid) MPH degree program at UC Berkeley. Before that he led the Interdisciplinary MPH program at UC Berkeley for 17 years. These roles allowed him to develop a keen understanding of higher education for working professionals. He currently co-teaches a course on design thinking applied to solution finding in public health. He has more than 20 years of experience advising many national governments on the design of maternity health services to reduce maternal mortality and improve birth outcomes. His work as a senior medical group administrator at a Kaiser Permanente (KP) Medical Center in Northern California for 12 years made him extremely familiar hospital operations, including vendor contracting, pharmacy operations oversight, prenatal care protocols, labor ward and operating room management, neonatal services to support high risk obstetrics and the use of the integrated electronic medical record system at Kaiser Permanente. Nap is also familiar with the hospital accreditation system in the USA, having successfully coordinated compliance preparation of pharmacy and maternal health services for tri-annual Joint Commission Accreditation (JCAHO) exercises for more than a decade. From 2005 to 2007 he was on the team coordinated the service and space planning for a new 250 bed (adult general and specialty) hospital in California. A practicing obstetrician/gynecologist for 30 years, he cared for more than 3,000 pregnant women from their first trimester through delivery and the postpartum period and the preconception and reproductive health management for many. He retired from active clinical practice in 2010 to spend more time on public health endeavors. Nap is also the founder and chairman of Impact Carbon, and the chairman of Venture Strategies Innovations.
Sandra McCoy, PhD, MPH is an Associate Adjunct Professor in the Division of Epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) School of Public Health. She studies how social, economic, and cultural forces influence disease transmission and health outcomes. During the past several years, Dr. McCoy has explored these relationships through the lens of HIV infection and reproductive health. Using a diverse array of approaches, her goal is to identify innovative, cost-effective, and scalable interventions to overcome global health challenges.
Dr. McCoy is especially interested in designing and testing new interventions that can positively change health behavior, such as increasing adherence to treatment, adoption of family planning, or encouraging people to engage in health screenings. Most recently, Dr. McCoy led a randomized study in Tanzania to compare the effects of short-term food and cash assistance on adherence to antiretroviral therapy among people living with HIV infection in Shinyanga Region (read more about the study here). Also in Tanzania and with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Grand Challenges Explorations Program, her team used patient-centered design and a customer centered approach to develop a simple, scalable intervention to retain patients in HIV care (read more about the study here). In addition to her work in Tanzania, Sandi is part of the external impact evaluation team for Zimbabwe’s Accelerated National Prevention of Mother-to-Child HIV Transmission (PMTCT) Program, and she also has a portfolio of projects focusing on HIV prevention among vulnerable populations in the United States.
At UC Berkeley, Dr. McCoy teaches the fall course PH250A: Introduction to Epidemiologic Methods and co-teaches the spring course PH253B: Epidemiology and Control of Infectious Diseases. In addition, Dr. McCoy has been an instructor at numerous impact evaluation workshops led by PEPFAR, the World Bank, and UNAIDS in the U.S., Italy, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Tanzania. She has experience with experimental and quasi-experimental impact evaluations, qualitative research, user-centered design, and implementation science.