Pandemics

Dr. Katz, the Associate Faculty Director at HGHI, serves as an Associate Physician in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and is a research scientist at the Center for Global Health at Massachusetts General Hospital. Her research over the past decade has focused on the social determinants of health-seeking behavior among people living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, with the goal of developing sustainable, socio-behavioral interventions aimed at improving care for the most under-served.

Dr. Katz is trained in Infectious Diseases and received her MD from the University of California at San Francisco and trained in Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and in Infectious Diseases at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She completed a fellowship in Global Women’s Health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and has been on staff there since 2009.

She has been consistently funded as a Principal Investigator through the National Institutes of Health since 2012 and has served as an Editorial Fellow and a National Correspondent for the New England Journal of Medicine.

Liana R. Woskie is a PhD candidate in Health Policy and Health Economics at the LSE and is a Research Fellow at the Harvard Global Health Institute. Her dissertation focuses on the evaluation of health system performance with a focus on person-centered care and autonomy; using this work to quantify human rights violations.

Prior to her PhD, Liana served as the Assistant Director of the Harvard Initiative on Global Health Quality (HIGHQ). In 2015-16, as an extension of her role at the Institute, she coordinated the Harvard-LSHTM Lancet Report on the Global Response to Ebola. More recently, she worked with Irene Papanicolas and Ashish Jha on an NASEM commission to quantify harm caused by poor quality healthcare in LMICs and a series of comparative health system performance evaluations in high income countries, with published output in JAMA, the BMJ and HealthAffairs. Current COVID-related projects include: 1.) Assessing the impact of social distancing policies on changes in aggregate human mobility, and 2.) Developing a risk score-card to mitigate reproductive health sequalae from COVID-19.

Liana holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and completed an MSc at the LSE and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). Prior to joining the Institute, she worked with the U.S. Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services and was a Global Health Corps Fellow at Partners In Health. As a Thomas J Watson Fellow Liana also worked with, and studied, iterations of the Community Health Worker model in over ten countries including Rwanda, Bangladesh, India and the United States.

Carissa Novak is the Assistant Director of Programs, overseeing all programmatic work at HGHI. Prior to joining HGHI, she worked at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment with an ecology and infectious disease research team, where she spent time living and working in Madagascar.

She also worked at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill managing a large-scale sexual assault research network, which included leading the first ever prospective study of sexual assault trauma in adult women in the US. She lived and worked in Kenya and Uganda while studying barriers to reproductive healthcare, specifically in seeking treatment for HPV and cervical cancer. She received her Master of Science in Global Health from Duke University’s Global Health Institute, and her BA in International Relations from Auburn University.

Luke Testa currently supports programmatic initiatives focused on global HIV equity and climate change and health. Luke also supports HGHI’s communications portfolio.

Luke is a part-time student at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health where he is studying to earn a Masters of Public Health in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Luke’s interests fall at the intersection of implementation science and behavioral health.