The Bixby Center for Population, Health and Sustainability funds graduate student summer internships and dissertation research in the areas of family planning and population for graduate students at UC Berkeley. The principal focus of the program is on family planning issues in developing countries where population growth rates remain high and reproductive health services are poor or inaccessible. (Internships that focus only on HIV/AIDS do not meet the criteria.)
Geffan Pearlson, UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program
Geffan Pearlson conducted her summer internship with Dr. Jennifer Kerns at UCSF. Her summer was spent working on her Joint Medical Program master’s thesis research project, preparing to begin enrollment in fall of 2018. This study is designed to assess provider bias in IUD removal practices, specifically [...]
Liz Crane, MPH Candidate in Maternal and Child Health, UC Berkeley
Liz Crane worked in Kigali and Musanze, Rwanda during summer 2017 to support the Bixby Center’s Family Planning Integration project, which aims to increase utilization of modern contraceptive methods and improve efficiency for family planning services provision through a service integration [...]
Iris Lin, MSW Candidate with a concentration in child welfare, UC Berkeley
For the summer, Iris interned with a NGO called Uganda Youth Development Link (UYDEL) in Kampala, Uganda. UYDEL served disadvantaged youth who are sexually exploited or at risk of sexual exploitation and consequently, reproductive health problems. Iris worked at one [...]
Brittany Schmitt, School of Social Welfare
For her summer internship Brittany worked with the National Forum for Action on Convergence (NFAC) in New Delhi, India. Through an internship established by the UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare in collaboration with the University of Delhi School of Social Welfare, she worked with NFAC [...]
Natalie Morris, School of Public Health
As part of the Bixby Center’s USAID West Africa Evidence for Development project, Natalie Morris traveled to Lomé, Togo for 10 weeks to assist with the implementation and monitoring of data collection for two operations research (OR) projects. These ORs examined the impact of the USAID [...]
Raphaela Lipinsky DeGette, UCB-UCSF Joint Medical Program
Raphaela worked with researchers at the Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública in Cuernavaca, Mexico, to study the impact of the country's conditional cash transfer program, Oportunidades, on fertility rates. Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs distribute cash benefits to low income households contingent on the families making certain [...]
Mollie Van Gordon, PhD Candidate, Geography, UC Berkeley
This past summer, Mollie worked in collaboration with the OASIS Initiative to conduct a situational analysis of the state of family planning training in Niger. Through interviews with key actors with decades of experience in family planning training institutions in Niger, she [...]
Laura Harris, UCB-UCSF Joint Medical Program
This summer Laura worked in Bogota, Colombia interviewing key stakeholders about clinicians' conscientious objection to abortion provision. Conscientious objection (CO) refers to clinicians' refusal to provide legal abortions based on moral or religious grounds. Thirteen percent of maternal deaths are due to unsafe abortion, and CO can be [...]
Colombia, Indonesia, South Africa, Tunisia, 2014
Lila Sheira, Maternal & Child Health Program
During her summer internship Lila worked as a researcher with Dr. Caitlin Gerdts of Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH), collaborating with her international research projects in Indonesia, South Africa, Colombia, and Tunisia. For the work in Indonesia, Lila developed the wireframes for an innovative mHealth intervention [...]
Maggie Crosby, Maternal & Child Health Program
During her summer internship Maggie worked at Pader Girls' Academy (PGA), a unique boarding school in northern Uganda. PGA students are primarily adolescent mothers. It is the only school in Uganda where teen mothers can continue their studies and keep their children with them at school. Maggie [...]
