2025 Cohort of HGHI Burke Global Health Fellows
Rose Olson
MD, MPH
“The Burke Fellowship will be instrumental in advancing our work to improve mental health treatment in Sierra Leone, enabling our team to develop effective, accessible mental health interventions for some of the world’s most underserved populations. As an early-stage investigator, this support is critical to launching a research career dedicated to global health equity and trauma-informed care.”
– Rose Olson
Dr. Olson is a women’s health researcher and internal medicine physician investigating the long-term physical and psychological health effects of trauma, including intimate partner and sexual violence. She develops trauma-informed, evidence-based interventions to improve outcomes for survivors. Dr. Olson completed the Doris and Howard Hiatt Residency in Global Health Equity and Internal Medicine and the Global Women’s Health Fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and earned her MPH from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In addition to academic research, she collaborates with global organizations—including the WHO Violence Against Women team and Physicians for Human Rights—to advance trauma-informed global health policy. Her long-term goal is to strengthen healthcare systems to better address the health consequences of trauma through increased awareness, scalable interventions, and policy change.
Project Title: “Resona: A Self-Directed, Mobile PTSD Support Platform for Survivors of Sexual Assault in Sierra Leone”
Project Description: Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a common consequence of sexual assault, with up to 75% of survivors experiencing PTSD after one month, and 40% after one year. Although effective treatments exist, barriers such as stigma and poor accessibility prevent most survivors from receiving potentially life-saving mental healthcare. These challenges are particularly significant in Sierra Leone, a country with one of the highest rates of gender-based violence globally, yet only three psychiatrists serve its 8 million people. As mobile phones are increasingly used across Sierra Leone, digital interventions offer unique potential to overcome access challenges. “Resona” is a self-directed, scalable PTSD treatment that adapts narrative processing therapy for mobile delivery. This study will support the user-centered co-design of the Resona prototype and test the preliminary usability of this novel, mobile PTSD treatment.
David Roach
MD, MBA, MSc
“The Burke Fellowship is providing a critical source of support that will allow me to partner with collaborators in Peru to demonstrate that the technology that we have have developed to quickly and cheaply diagnose resistant bacterial infections not only works in a laboratory in Boston but also in a hospital in Peru. In doing so, we hope to show that effective diagnostics can be available in all areas of the world, not just in well-resourced settings.”
– David Roach
Dr. Roach’s research interest lies in using techniques in bacterial genomics to better understand important global pathogens such as Klebsiella pneumoniae. He also is developing novel gene-based diagnostic platforms to rapidly and cheaply detect bacterial infections of the bloodstream and to characterize their resistance patterns. His goal is to develop the next generation of bacterial diagnostics that are compatible with low-resource environments around the world, as these are the areas most heavily impacted by bacterial infections. He has a longstanding collaboration with researchers in Peru who have helped make this research possible. Clinically, he is interested in general infectious disease, the management of complex bloodstream infections, and how decision making is impacted with emerging diagnostics.
Project Title: “Deploying BADLOCK in Peru: A Low-Cost Solution for Rapid Detection of Resistant Bloodstream Infections”
Project Description: Antimicrobial-resistant (AMR) bacterial infections are a growing global health crisis, causing nearly 5 million deaths annually, with the highest impact in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Limited diagnostic infrastructure in these regions hampers the timely identification of bloodstream infections (BSIs), leading to delayed and ineffective treatment. To address this critical gap, we have developed BADLOCK, a CRISPR-Cas based diagnostic assay that is low-cost and designed to detect bacterial species and key AMR genes directly from blood cultures. In collaboration with partners in Peru, we aim to: 1) perform a needs assessment at participating hospitals to identify diagnostic targets, 2) refine the assay using a curated collection of sequenced clinical isolates from the region to define genotypic drivers of AMR, and 3) conduct a pilot study at three clinical sites to evaluate BADLOCK’s feasibility and performance in an LMIC. This project aims to demonstrate BADLOCK’s potential as a diagnostic tool for managing AMR infections while emphasizing a potential paradigm shift toward adopting low-cost, gene-based approaches for bacterial diagnostics in LMICs.