Research Fellows

Bixby Center Fellows

Bhavya Joshi

a beautiful female graduate student with dark long curly hairBhavya Joshi is a third year DrPH candidate at UC Berkeley. As a Global Public Health Fellow, Bixby Summer 2022 Fellow, Human Rights Center Fellow 2022, and African Studies Center Fellow, Bhavya’s doctoral research focuses on understanding the reproductive health services and needs among women in contexts affected by multiple events of crises. As a women's human rights advocate and educator, Bhavya supports women's rights defenders from across the globe to build their capacity to use international human rights mechanisms for advocacy and activism at national, regional, and international levels. 

Blake Erhardt-Ohren

a female graduate student is smiling at youBlake Erhardt-Ohrenis a third year DrPH candidate at UC Berkeley. She is passionate about improved access to sexual and reproductive health services, particularly safe abortion and post-abortion care, for forcibly displaced populations. Her dissertation focuses on the exploration of maternal death surveillance and response in refugee camps and settlements, and will test out a new methodology to more accurately estimate the burden of maternal mortality, and specifically mortality due to abortion complications, in Kakuma, Kenya. 

Divya Periyakoil

a female graduate student is smiling at youDivya Periyakoil is a Master's Public Health student at Johns Hopkings University.  She has an avid research interest in population health, the social determinants of health, and the public health implications of social disparities, with the goal of promoting health equity for the underserved.  She hopes to apply computational and data science techniques to work on the thorny health problems that plague humans. Currently,  she is a visiting student researcher in the Bixby Center.

Emily McLean

a female student researcher with dark long curly hair smiling

Emily McLean is the Bixby Center's visiting researcher.  She is a PhD Research Fellow at Bergen Centre for Ethics and Priority Setting (BCEPS), at the Department for Global Health and Primary Care and an affiliate researcher at Global Health Anthropology at the University of Bergen. She is a medical doctor by training.Her PhD project aims to explore the ethical complexities and priority dilemmas related to the implementation of safe abortion care in Ethiopia with a focus on providers and policy makers. The goal is to produce evidence for policy, guidelines, and medical ethics training programs.

Mikail Aliyu

A male graduate student with black short hair is nicely smiling at youMikail Aliyuis a third year DrPH candidate at UC Berkeley. His research is focused on expanding access to self-care interventions for sexual and reproductive health in Sub-Saharan Africa, with particular emphasis on introducing and scaling up access to DMPA-SC – a self-injectable contraceptive among women and girls in hard-to-reach communities. Over the past decade, he has worked in various capacities, providing technical assistance to governments and donors to facilitate enabling structures and processes for priority setting and coordination of reproductive, maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health services in the Sub-Saharan region.

Renee Clarke

a nice female graduate student reseacher is smiling at youRenee Clarke is a third year DrPH candidate at UC Berkeley. Her research is focused on care after birth for Black birthing people in California. Renee examines the healthcare needs and experiences of Black women up to one year postpartum to provide solutions to improve models of care. Her focus is on maternal and child health policy, strategy, and innovation to improve healthcare systems. Her passion has always been service leadership and eliminating health disparity gaps among women, infants, and children. 

The Bixby Center is committed to providing research opportunities for scholars interested in the Bixby Center focus areas