2024 Global Health Symposium

Dr. Ahonkhai is an Infectious Diseases and HIV physician and health equity researcher with expertise in epidemiology, behavioral, and implementation research. Dr. Ahonkhai is an Associate Physician in Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. Propelled by a passion to deliverable equitable healthcare to patients who are often unseen by traditional healthcare systems, Dr. Ahonkhai’s has focused her efforts on innovative mHealth-supported and community-based intervention strategies in West Africa and leads multidisciplinary research teams in these areas. Her work has spanned from developing unique mHealth-based interventions to promote medication adherence for youth living with HIV by harnessing the influence of social norms (PeerNaija), to improving mental health outcomes for youth living with HIV by tapping into the power of storytelling (Change My Story), to partnering with barbers in Middle TN to reduce HIV stigma for Black men in the region (Cutting Out Stigma). Dr. Ahonkhai has also worked on global and local programs to improve access to testing, treatment, and vaccination as well as education for and about emerging infectious diseases like COVID-19.

Adeline Boatin is an Assistant Professor in Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology at Harvard Medical School and an Attending at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). She is a researcher, clinician, and educator with over a decade of experience in both high-resource and resource-limited settings. Through her research, she aims to reduce global reproductive health inequities and focuses on the use of digital technology to improve surgical care, ranging from decision-making for surgery to post-operative recovery. Her current research portfolio explores wireless monitoring technology to overcome human resource limitations in post-operative care. She also leads a multi-site, multi-country study examining cesarean delivery use in sub-Saharan Africa. Dr. Boatin is a Ghanaian native, born in Zambia, and has lived, studied, and worked in Zambia, Ghana, Uganda, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Prof. I. Glenn Cohen, JD is a world-renowned expert in bioethics, health law, and the intersection of bioethics with the law. As the youngest-ever tenured professor at Harvard Law School, he has advised the U.S. Vice President on reproductive rights and engaged with global audiences on medical AI policy. His prolific work, comprising over 200 articles and numerous books, spans diverse topics such as medical AI, reproductive technology, psychedelic drugs, and health policy. Prof. Cohen is a sought-after speaker at international conferences and a contributor to leading journals and media outlets. He has also played a significant role in legal education, receiving awards for teaching and creating an online course on bioethics. Beyond academia, he actively contributes to legal cases and provides expert testimony in health law and bioethics litigation. Prof. Cohen leads influential projects on precision medicine, artificial intelligence, and the law, showcasing his commitment to advancing ethical practices in healthcare innovation.

Rocío Sáenz-Madrigal, MD, is a former Minister of Health of Costa Rica and former Executive President of the Costa Rican Social Security Fund (Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social). She has served as a researcher at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels in the Schools of Medicine, Public Health, and Nursing at the University of Costa Rica. At present, she coordinates the Patient Navigation Project, the Permanent Forum on Cancer in Women in Costa Rica, and the research project on Primary Health Care. She also serves as the Executive Director of the Network of the Americas for Health Equity (RAES) and works as an international consultant and researcher in health systems.

Dr. Austin Demby is the Minister of Health of Sierra Leone. In this capacity, Dr. Demby manages over 45,000 staff across diverse disciplines, focusing on providing Universal Health Access to nearly 8 million Sierra Leoneans. Prior to his appointment, Dr. Demby held several senior positions in the United States Government. Dr. Demby is a founding member of CDC’s Global AIDS Program and between 1999 and 2006, he led several teams that established Gap program offices in Ethiopia, Rwanda, Tanzania, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Between 2011 and 2016, Dr. Demby served as the Director for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), at HHS. In that capacity, Dr. Demby managed the Department’s $2 Billion global HIV/AIDS portfolio implemented by CDC, NIH, FDA, SAMHSA, and HRSA. In 2014-2015, Dr. Demby played a key leadership role in the US Government’s response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

Francesca Dominici, PhD is the Director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative at Harvard University and the Clarence James Gamble Professor of Biostatistics, Population and Data Science at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and of the International Society of Mathematical Statistics. Dr. Dominici is an expert in causal inference, machine learning, and Bayesian statistics and leads an interdisciplinary group of scientists with the ultimate goal of addressing important questions in environmental health science, climate change, and biomedical science. Dominici has provided both the scientific community and policy makers with robust evidence on the adverse health effects of air pollution, noise pollution, and climate change. Her studies have directly and routinely impacted air quality policy. Dominici has published more than 250 peer-reviewed publications and was recognized in Thomson Reuter’s 2019 list of the most highly cited researchers–ranking in the top 1% of cited scientists in her field. She is an elected Member of the National Academy of Medicine and of the International Mathematical Statistics. Her work has been covered by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, BBC, the Guardian, CNN, and NPR. In April 2020, she was awarded the Karl E. Peace Award for Outstanding Statistical Contributions for the Betterment of Society by the American Statistical Association. Dominici is an advocate for the career advancement of women faculty. Her work on the Johns Hopkins University Committee on the Status of Women earned her the campus Diversity Recognition Award in 2009. At the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, she has led the Committee for the Advancement of Women Faculty.

Appointed Vice Provost in 2015, Elliott oversees and works to advance international academic initiatives, extending the global reach of Harvard’s research and teaching activities. In this capacity, Elliott serves as the University’s representative in negotiating agreements with foreign governments, receiving senior international delegations, and representing Harvard to peer institutions and alumni worldwide. In addition, he shares responsibility for supporting the community of international students, scholars, and faculty in Cambridge and Boston, as well as for guiding Harvard’s international advancement and overall global strategy. As a scholar of China, Elliott is an authority on the last four centuries of Chinese history, in particular the Qing period (1636-1911). His research encompasses the history of relations between China and its nomadic frontier, with special attention to questions of ethnicity and empire.

Jayati Ghosh taught economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi for nearly 35 years, and currently works as a Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has authored and/or edited 20 books and more than 200 scholarly articles. Ghosh has been awarded several prizes, including the International Labour Organisation’s Decent Work Research Prize for 2011; and most recently, the 2023 Galbraith award of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, “in recognition of breakthrough discoveries in economics and outstanding contributions to humanity through leadership, research and service.” She has advised governments in India and other countries and consulted for various international organizations. For two decades, from 2002 to 2021, she was the Executive Secretary of International Development Economics Associates. Ghosh is a member of several international boards and commissions, including the UN High-Level Advisory Board on Economic and Social Affairs, the WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All, and the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism.

Dr. Gichoya is an associate professor at Emory university in Interventional Radiology and Informatics leading the HITI (Healthcare AI Innovation and Translational Informatics) lab . Her work is centered around using data science to study health equity. Her group works in 4 areas – building diverse datasets for machine learning (for example the Emory Breast dataset); evaluating AI for bias and fairness; validating AI in the real world setting and training the next generation of data scientists (both clinical and technical students) through hive learning and village mentoring. She serves as the program director for radiology: AI trainee editorial board and the medical students machine learning elective. She has mentored over 60 students across the world (now successful faculty, post doc, PHD and industry employees) from several institutions around the world.

Gregg Gonsalves is an Associate Professor in the Department of the Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at Yale School of Public Health and an Associate Professor (Adjunct) at Yale Law School. At Yale, he also co-directs the Global Health Justice Partnership, an initiative of YSPH and YLS, working at the intersections of health and human rights and social justice. For over 30 years, he has been an AIDS activist, working first with the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in Boston and New York, then co-founding the Treatment Action Group (TAG) and the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition (ITPC). He is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow.

Dr. Jean Gregory Jerome is a medical doctor, public health specialist and Fulbright scholar with 20 years of public health experience in Haiti, Rwanda, Malawi, Liberia and Sierra Leone interacting closely with Ministries of Health entities and other partners in those countries. With an overall orientation in health system strengthening, Dr Jerome has extensive experience in the design, management, and implementation of health projects and programs, in quality management of medical care and services, as well as in implementation of operational research. Dr. Jerome has worked as a clinician, program manager, technical advisor and as a senior leader in Haiti, Sierra Leone and the Boston office for Partners In Health (PIH). Dr. Jerome is currently supporting the global PIH as the Senior Advisor on Health System Strengthening with a focus on projects aiming at improving quality of care provided to patients. Dr. Jerome has served as author in several publications derived from the implementation of major health initiatives.

Dr. Kerry is the co-founder and CEO of Seed Global Health (Seed), a non-profit organization focused on health systems strengthening and transformation through long-term investments and training of the health workforce. Under her leadership, Seed has helped educate more than 34,000 doctors, nurses, and midwives in seven countries, helping to improve health care for more than 73 million people. In June 2023 Dr. Kerry was appointed WHO Special Envoy for Climate Change and Health and is leading efforts to build advocacy around the impact of climate change on health in order to ensure equitable and just climate action. As co-chair of a workstream on the World HealthOrganization’s Public Health and Emergency Health Workforce Roadmap, she is helping to galvanize consensus for investment in surveillance, detection, and treatment for the next pandemic. Dr. Kerry is the associate director of partnerships and global initiatives at the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Global Health. She also directs the Global Public Policy and Social Change program at Harvard Medical School where she has focused on links between security and health. She is the mother of two children.

David McCoy is the Evidence to Policy Research Lead at the United Nations University’s International Institute for Global Health (UNU-IIGH) based in Malaysia. Prior to this, he was Professor of Global Public Health at Queen Mary University London, and before that, he was Director of Medact, a UK-based global health charity that grew out of the medical peace movement of the 1950s and 1960s. He has spent many years as a public health practitioner in the UK and in South Africa where he worked on the post-apartheid transformation of the health system. Before moving into public health, McCoy worked as a clinician in the National Health Service in England and in a rural district hospital in Kwazulu, South Africa. He has a masters in maternal and child health from the University of Cape Town and a doctorate from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Dr. Moyo is BHP’s Laboratory Director and a Research associate with Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health (HSPH). He is a former Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health McGoldrick Fellow Biostatistics, and has completed2 Post-Doctoral Fellowships supported by NIH Fogarty International Center (Global Health Fellow, Harvard HBNU) and Wellcome Trust funded DELTAS SANTHE program (Post-Doc Scientific Fellowship, BHP). His interests include characterization of early HIV-1 Infection, estimating HIV incidence, evolutionary bioinformatics, phylogenetics and molecular epidemiology. He has made a number of significant recent advances in the analysis of HIV recency of infection by incorporating HIV diversity refine cross-sectional incidence estimation and over 140 peer reviewed publications. He has worked on various projects including: evaluation of point-of-care viral load and CD4 devices, early infant treatment, community-based prevention studies, Hepatitis, CMV and HPV genotyping, HIV-1 drug resistance. In 2016, Sikhulile was nominated co- vice Chair of the ACTG/IMPAACT Laboratory Technologist Committee. He participates in various international and local HIV technical working groups. Dr Moyo is a member of the Botswana’s Presidential COVID-19 Task Force Team as a co-Chief Scientist. He is an Investigator & Site-Principal Investigator for some NIH funded projects and is a supervisor/mentor for many fellows/researchers at BHP.

Vikram Patel is The Paul Farmer Professor of Global Health at the Harvard Medical School where he chairs the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. He co-leads the Mental Health for All Lab which focuses on the social determinant of mental health problems and the use of community resources for their prevention and treatment and co-leads the GlobalMentalHealth@Harvard initiative. Patel is also a co-founder of Sangath, an award-winning Indian NGO which has pioneered approaches to achieve mental health equity. He is a Fellow of the UK’s Academy of Medical Sciences and member of the US National Academy of Medicine.

Phuong N. Pham, PhD, MPH, an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, serves as the Director of Education at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, and is the co-founder of KoboToolbox. With an extensive background spanning over two decades, she specializes in the design and implementation of epidemiologic and evaluation research, as well as the development of innovative technology solutions and educational programs. Her expertise extends to regions impacted by both ongoing conflicts and post-conflict scenarios, including northern Uganda, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, the Central African Republic, Iraq, Cambodia, Colombia, and other areas affected by mass violence and humanitarian crises. Currently she lead the following programs at HHI:  Transitional Justice Evaluation Team (TJET), Humanitarian Studies Concentration, Building a Better Response (BBR), Local Engagement and Response Network (LEARN), and Peace and Human Rights Data.

James H. Stock is Vice Provost for Climate and Sustainability, Harvard University; the Director of the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, Harvard University; and the Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University. His current research includes energy and environmental economics with a focus on fuels and on U.S. climate change policy. He is co-author, with Mark Watson, of a leading undergraduate econometrics textbook. In 2013–2014, he served as Member of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, where his portfolio included macroeconomics and energy and environmental policy. He was Chair of the Harvard Economics Department from 2007–2009. He holds a M.S. in Statistics and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Milind Tambe is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and Director of Center for Research in Computation and Society at Harvard University; concurrently, he is also Principal Scientist and Director for “AI for Social Good” at Google Research. He is recipient of the IJCAI (International Joint Conference on AI) John McCarthy Award, AAAI (Association for Advancement of AI) Feigenbaum Prize, AAAI Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture Award, AAMAS ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Autonomous Agents Research Award, INFORMS ( Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Wagner prize for excellence in Operations Research practice and MORS (Military Operations Research Society) Rist Prize. He is a fellow of AAAI and ACM. For his work on AI and public safety, he has received Columbus Fellowship Foundation Homeland security award and commendations and certificates of appreciation from the US Coast Guard, the Federal Air Marshals Service and airport police at the city of Los Angeles.

David Walton, MD, MPH, was appointed as US Global Malaria Coordinator on August 15, 2022. Dr. Walton brings over two decades of experience working in global health, including working on the ground in Haiti to fight the 2010 cholera outbreak and on the front lines of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone. Dr. Walton has a proven track record of building local partnerships to expand access to care and providing primary health services to the hardest to reach populations. Dr. Walton takes the helm of the President’s Malaria Initiative after serving as the Senior Director of Global Health at the Butterfly Network, Inc., co-founding Build Health International, and 15 years with Partners In Health. Dr. Walton was previously an Associate Physician in the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He holds an MD from Harvard Medical School, an MPH from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and training in Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital as the first Doris and Howard Hiatt Global Health Equity resident.

Dyann Wirth is the Richard Pearson Strong Professor of Infectious Diseases in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the chair of the World HealthOrganization’s Malaria Policy Advisory Committee (MPAG). Dyann has been a significant leader in malaria research for more than 30 years. She led the development of genetic engineering tools for protozoan parasites and pioneered the use of genetic epidemiology to address transmission and spread of drug resistance of Plasmodium falciparum. She was also the first to use DNA probes to diagnose both leishmaniasis and malaria. Today, her laboratory blends the scientific environments of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Broad Institute, and research institutions from across the globe to create a unique malaria research and training network.

Alicia Ely Yamin, JD, MPH, PhD is a Lecturer on Law and the Director of the Global Health and Rights Project at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard Law School; Adjunct Senior Lecturer on Health Policy and Management at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health; and Senior Adviser on Human Rights and Health Policy at Partners In Health. Known globally for her trans-disciplinary work in relation to economic and social rights, reproductive justice, the right to health, and the intersections between development paradigms and human rights, Yamin’s career has bridged academia and activism. She has lived in Latin America and East Africa for much of her professional life and worked with local advocacy organizations, including co-founding a program on health and human rights in the Asociación Pro Derechos Humanos (Lima, Peru; 1999). Yamin has served on numerous WHO and UN expert committees and regularly provides testimony and guidance to tribunals and legislative bodies around the globe in relation to the application of international and comparative law to health and sexual and reproductive rights issues.