Center of Expertise in Global and Community Health - Chairs and Faculty
Geren Stone, MD, DTM&H, Director, Global Primary Program, MGH and Lisa Cosimi, MD, Associate Physician in the Divisions of Global Health Equity and Infectious Diseases, BWH serve as faculty chairs. The chairs and faculty are leaders in the fields of Global Health and care of vulnerable populations and serve as speakers, mentors and research collaborators with participating trainees.
Each faculty member has indicated areas they are willing to mentor trainees in. They have also indicated if they are open to having a trainee shadow them. Please contact our office to facilitate mentor meetings and/or setting up a shadowing experience.
Chairs

Lisa Cosimi, MD
Associate Physician, BWH, Divisions of Global Health Equity and Infectious Diseases
Mentor Areas: quality improvement, program evaluation, implementation research, medical education
Willing to shadow: no
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Dr. Cosimi earned a B.A. in Economics from Cornell University in 1992 and M.D. from the Weill Cornell Medical College in 1996. She completed her residency in Internal Medicine and Primary Care at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Infectious Disease training at theMass General Brigham combined fellowship program, before joining the BWH as faculty in Infectious Diseases. She subsequently moved to Vietnam, where she was based from 2003-2007. During this time she trained and mentored HIV health care workers and was recruited by the U.S. CDC Global AIDS Program (GAP) Vietnam to lead the development of their HIV clinical programs and operational research efforts under the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). During this time she became increasingly interested in the role that health system gaps play in the quality of care. Dr. Cosimi’s current areas of research include developing and evaluating ways to strengthen medical education and health systems to improve healthcare quality in resource-limited settings. Her group, The Partnership for Health Advancement in Vietnam (HAIVN), brings together faculty, residents and medical students throughout the Harvard Medical School community to partner with Vietnam’s Ministry of Health, Medical Universities and hospitals to reform and modernize health care worker education, and improve health system gaps and quality of health care throughout the country.
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Geren Stone, MD, DTM&H
Director, MGH Global Primary Care Program
Mentor areas: Global Health, Community Health, Homeless Health
Willing to shadow: Yes
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Geren Stone is the MGH Global Medicine Program Director and a primary care physician with Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program. Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, he graduated from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and then spent time working in Tajikistan before attending the University of Virginia School of Medicine. He completed his Internal Medicine/Primary Care residency training at MGH and served as Interim Ambulatory Chief Resident. He then obtained a Diploma in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (DTM&H) at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and subsequently worked with Indiana University as the Medicine Team Leader for the AMPATH program (Academic Model for the Provision of Healthcare) in Eldoret, Kenya from 2011-2013. He returned to MGH in 2013 as the Director of the Global Medicine Program within the Department of Medicine and Center for Global Health.Geren’s interests are engaging health disparities and the systems that generate them by building mutually beneficial partnerships that train leaders, allow for community-informed innovation and research, and ultimately impact the health of communities. Working as a primary care provider for Boston Health Care for the Homeless, he hopes to model a career engaging vulnerable populations locally and globally.
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H. Thomas Aretz, MD
VP Partners Healthcare International; Co-director Harvard Macy Institute
Mentor areas: medical education including curriculum and institutional development in global setting; global healthcare development
Willing to shadow: No
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Dr. Aretz is the Vice President for Client Services at Partners HealthCare International (PHI), the international arm of the Mass General Brigham HealthCare System in Boston, Massachusetts. He presently focuses on the development of hospitals and healthcare systems internationally, with a special focus on the design, reform and implementation of academic institutions and workforce development. In this role, he oversees business development and projects in China and the MENA region, as well as all academic programs. He began his international work in 1996 on behalf of Harvard Medical School (HMS) and Harvard Medical International (HMI) and did so until 2008, when HMI was transitioned to PHS. He has worked in over 40 countries.
Dr. Aretz is a graduate of Harvard Medical School and trained in Anatomic and Clinical Pathology at the MGH, specializing in Cardiovascular Pathology and he is certified in Anatomic and Clinical Pathology by the American Board of Pathology. He is an Associate Professor of Pathology at HMS and was the course director of an 11-week-long integrated second-year course at HMS from 1992 to 2005. During this time, he served on and chaired many committees and was a founding member of the Academy at HMS. He is a Program and Course Director for the Harvard Macy Institute and has spearheaded its international efforts, including its leadership courses. He holds a clinical appointment at the MGH and has served on many hospital (IRB chairman) committees and industrial boards; he is the co-founder of two medical technology companies.
Dr. Aretz has lectured, taught and published extensively and has received multiple teaching awards at Harvard Medical School and MGH. He has also won recognition for his efforts to improve medical education around the world. In 2005, he was named an "Ehrenbürger" (honorary citizen) of the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich for his contributions to the long-standing Harvard-LMU alliance and in 2008, he was recognized with the MILES Award (Mentoring, Innovation, and Leadership in Educational Scholarship), given by the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore for outstanding contributions to the advancement of global medical education and academic medicine.
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Ingrid Bassett, MD, MPH
Associate Professor of Medicine
Mentor areas: HIV testing and linkage to care; TB screening strategies; HIV prevention; implementation science
Willing to shadow: No
Read More...Dr. Bassett is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an Infectious Disease physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. She has over 15 years of experience leading clinical research in South Africa related to HIV and TB screening and linkage to care, with a recent focus on community-based interventions.
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Susan Briggs, MD, MPH, FACS
Associate Professor of Surgery; Affiliate Faculty Harvard Program in Global Surgery; Director International Trauma and Disaster Institute, MGH
Mentor areas: Global Surgery, Disaster Medical Response
Willing to shadow: No
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Dr. Susan Briggs is a General and Trauma Surgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Associate Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Briggs completed her surgical training at MGH and her MPH in International Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. She is Director of the International Trauma and Disaster Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Dr. Briggs has been active, both nationally and internationally, in trauma and disaster relief activities with the United States Government and non-governmental agencies such as Project Hope and the American Refugee Committee. Currently, she is the Supervising Medical Officer of the Department of Health and Human Services/ASPR/OPEO Specialty Medical Teams, including the Medical Surgical Response Teams (IMSURT). She has participated in numerous national and international disasters, including Armenia, the World Trade Center bombing, the Bam, Iran earthquake as head of the United States Disaster Team, the Katrina hurricane relief in Louisiana, and the humanitarian response to the recent earthquake in Haiti.
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Hilarie Cranmer, MD, MPH
Director of Global Disaster Response, MGH; Global Health Attending Physician, Department of Emergency Medicine, MGH; Associate Professor, HMS & T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Mentor areas:
Willing to shadow:
Read More...Dr. Hilarie Cranmer, MD, MPH, the first Director of Disaster Response at the Center of Global Health at Massachusetts General Hospital, the largest teaching hospital of Harvard University, is clinical faculty in the Department of Emergency Medicine, and an Assistant Professor at both Harvard Medical School and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. As the first Director of Education for the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, she founded and directed the Humanitarian Studies Initiative and the Global Women’s Health Fellowship. In its first 10 years, over 500 graduate students, medical residents, nurses, and physicians have completed these training programs. Her alumni have gone on to hold leadership positions in some of the premier humanitarian agencies in the world.
Her research focus has been on the professionalization of humanitarian providers including developing educational initiatives, minimum standards in safety and security and providing effective response to those affected by disasters and emergencies worldwide. After the Haiti January 2010 earthquake, she built and ran the largest field hospital in Haiti, caring for over 5000 patients and their families with more than 700 international volunteers, recognized by the UN and the US Government as being the best field hospital post disaster in the last 25 years. She led MGH in deploying multi-disciplinary teams after Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines and the recent Nepal Earthquake. She served as the Technical Advisor on Ebola for International Medical Corps who are providing Ebola Virus Disease case management in West Africa. She has recently been recognized by her work with the 2015 Institute for International Medicines’ Humanitarian Crises Response Award and the 2015 Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health Alumni Award of Merit, its highest honor annually bestowed.
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Lena E Dohlman, MD, MPH
Assistant Professor, HMS
Mentor: Global capacity building through education
Willing to shadow: yes
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Lena Dohlman is a non-clinical staff anesthesiologist in the Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and is an Assistant Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School. Her interests are in regional anesthesia, medical education and global health. She has had a long and enthusiastic commitment to all three since her 1981 experience in Celebes, Indonesia teaching regional anesthesia techniques and learning how to give ether anesthesia with an EMO inhaler. As a volunteer with Health Volunteers Overseas (HVO) Lena has taught anesthesia in Vietnam, St Lucia, South Africa and Malawi and has held several leadership positions within HVO, the ASA and other organizations. She attended the Harvard School of Public Health for an MPH in 1991, an education she recommends highly for those interested in a global health career. In 2001, Lena initiated the SEA HVO Traveling Fellowship, a program to sponsor senior anesthesia residents to spend a month teaching anesthesia at HVO sites in developing countries. In 2014, She cofounded the Harvard Global Anesthesia Initiative to encourage Harvard wide networking and promotion of responsible leadership in global health among anesthesia providers. Dr. Dohlman has lectured on global health locally and nationally at society meetings and has lectured internationally on anesthesia topics in Indonesia, Vietnam, Malawi and South Africa. Working with an international team of instructors, she organized the first PTC courses in Vietnam. She arranged for translation of the manual and teaching slides to Vietnamese and the donation of teaching materials. She is currently working on further improving anesthesia education in Vietnam and other LMICs through workshops and consultation with education leaders.
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Paul Farmer, MD, PhD
Chair, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine; Chief, Partners In Health, Founding Director Division of Global Health Equity, BWH; Kolokotrones University Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, HMS
Mentor areas:
Willing to shadow:
Read More...Medical anthropologist and physician Paul E. Farmer is Chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Farmer is also the Kolokotrones University Professor and Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is Co-founder and Chief Strategist of Partners In Health (PIH), an international non-profit organization that provides direct health care services and has undertaken research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty. Additionally, Farmer serves as Special Adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General on Community Based Medicine and Lessons from Haiti. Farmer and his colleagues in the United States, Haiti, Peru, Russia, Rwanda, Lesotho, and Malawi have pioneered novel community-based treatment strategies that demonstrate the delivery of high-quality health care in resource-poor settings.
Harvard University President Drew Faust said of him: “Paul Farmer is best known to the public as a pioneering humanitarian. But among scholars he is equally well-known for his research and writing, which have crossed boundaries between the social sciences and biomedical research and married theory and practice to forge a new approach to global health. He is also an outstanding educator with a remarkable capacity to inspire students to focus their minds and their energies on serving the common good.”
Dr. Farmer has written extensively on health, human rights, and the consequences of social inequality. His most recent books are In the Company of the Poor: Conversations with Dr. Paul Farmer and Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez; Reimagining Global Health: An Introduction; and To Repair the World: Paul Farmer Speaks to the Next Generation. Other titles include Haiti After the Earthquake; Partner to the Poor: A Paul Farmer Reader; Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor; The Uses of Haiti; Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues; and AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. Tracy Kidder's book, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World, chronicles the development of Dr. Farmer's work in Haiti and beyond.
Farmer is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association, the Outstanding International Physician (Nathan Davis) Award from the American Medical Association, a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and, with his PIH colleagues, the Hilton Humanitarian Prize. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Paul Firth, MBChB, BA
Pediatric Anesthesiologist
Mentor areas: Outcome research; pain management; critical care
Willing to shadow: No
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Critical Care and Pain Medicine at MGH. His clinical, education and research work is focused on collaborations in Mbarara, Uganda. Areas of interest include hospital outcome measurement, pain control and distance education.Critical Care and Pain Medicine at MGH. His clinical, education and research work is focused on collaborations in Mbarara, Uganda. Areas of interest include hospital outcome measurement, pain control and distance education.
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Greg Fricchione, MD
Director, Pierce Division of Global Psychiatry, MGH
Mentor areas: Capacity Building, Policy, Research
Willing to shadow: No
Read More...Gregory Fricchione MD has been on faculty at Harvard Medical School (HMS) since 1993 and is a Professor of Psychiatry at HMS. He first came to Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in 1982 as a psychosomatic medicine fellow. Since July 2002 he has been Associate Chief of Psychiatry at MGH and Director of the Division of Psychiatry and Medicine. He directs a large staff of attending psychiatrists and psychosomatic medicine fellows taking care of the psychiatric problems of over 5000 medically and surgically ill patients each year. In 2000, he joined the Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia, where he directed the Mental Health Program for Mrs. Rosalynn Carter while on leave of absence from HMS. Prior to this, he was Director of Medical Psychiatry at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Fricchione received his M.D. from New York University School of Medicine in 1978. He is board certified in psychiatry and has added qualifications in psychosomatic medicine. In addition to his clinical experience in general hospital psychiatry, Dr. Fricchione has been committed to medical education. Presently he is Director of the Psychosomatic Medicine Fellowship at MGH. He has taught in the medical schools at New York University, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the University of Auckland in New Zealand and at Emory University as well as at HMS. Dr. Fricchione has been an active researcher in psychosomatic medicine and has made contributions to the treatment of patients with catatonia and to the management of cardiac patients who suffer from co-morbid psychiatric conditions. He is the author of over 140 peer-reviewed articles and is a co-author of the MGH Handbook on General Hospital Psychiatry (2010), Catatonia; From Psychopathology to Neurobiology (2004) and The Heart-Mind Connection (2005). He is also the author of a recent book from the Johns Hopkins University Press titled Compassion and Healing in Medicine and Society. On the Nature and Uses of Attachment Solutions to Separation Challenges (2011).
He serves on the Mental Health Task Force of the Carter Center and on the Board of the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregiving. He was a consultant to Ethiopian Public Health Training Initiative and is a reviewer of the Mental Health Strategy for that country. From 2003 to 2009 he was the founding Director of the MGH Chester M. Pierce Division of Global Psychiatry and serves as a senior scientist with the Division now under the direction of Dr David Henderson. In 2006 he became Director of the Benson Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at MGH succeeding Dr Herbert Benson. This Institute has clinical, educational and research missions to improve medical care at the mind body interface and to promote health and prevent stress related illnesses. Its research arm has a focus on Clinical and Social Neuroscience with particular attention to genomic models. With regard to post traumatic stress in the military population, he has liaisoned with the Red Sox Foundation/MGH Homebase Program and has consulted with the National Intrepid Center of Excellence and the US Naval Medical Center in San Diego.
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Janina R. Galler, MD
Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Division of Pediatric Gastroeneterology and Nutrition, Mucosal Immunology and Biology Research Center, MassGeneral Hospital for Children l School, and Senior Research Associate, Pediatric Gastroeneterology
Mentor areas: Global Health, Nutrition, Mental Health, Aging, Longitudinal Research
Willing to shadow: Yes
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Janina R. Galler, MD, a national and internationally recognized leader in the areas of childhood nutrition and development, and global health, has extensive experience directing innovative longitudinal and collaborative projects in the Caribbean and Latin America. Her research is multi-disciplinary and utilizes epidemiologic, observational, experimental and clinical methods, focused on the interplay of intrinsic developmental processes with environmental adversities including malnutrition, poverty, maternal depression and childhood abuse and neglect, and their effects across the life span and generations. Of particular note is her leadership of the 50+ years Barbados Nutrition Study. She has also spearheaded a 33-year longitudinal Breast-Feeding Study in Barbados and a community-based intervention program in four Maya villages, Yucatan with an aim to preventing malnutrition and its consequences. In addition to these human studies, she has maintained a neuroscience laboratory program studying animal models of malnutrition and brain development. She is author or co-author of more than 170 peer-reviewed publications and editor of two volumes on nutrition and the brain.
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Annekathryn Goodman, MD, MS, MA, MPH
Director of the MGH Center for Global Health Program against Gender-Based Violence; Co-director of MGH Women’s Global Health
Mentor areas: Gender Based violence; structural violence against vulnerable populations; Disaster Medicine and the role of Obstetrics and Gynecology; Cancer care for women; Global health and women’s reproductive health
Willing to shadow: yes
Read More...Dr. Annekathryn Goodman is a Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology at Harvard Medical School and a Fellow of both the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American College of Surgeons. She has a fulltime practice in Gynecologic Oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital and is an affiliate of MGH Global Disaster Response and the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an Associate of MGH Center for Global Health. She is the Director of the MGH Center for Global Health Program against Gender-Based Violence and Co-director of MGH Women’s Global Health.
She completed medical school and residency training in obstetrics and gynecology at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston and her fellowship training in gynecologic oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). In addition to board certification in gynecologic oncology, she is certified in acupuncture, and has completed training in both pastoral and palliative care. She received a certificate in Clinical Ethics and Health Policy from the Center for Practical Bioethics, University of Kansas Medical School. She received a certificate in Global health and MPH in Health Policy and Management from New York Medical College. She has undergone advanced training in humanitarian disaster relief work through the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, Missioncraft in disaster relief operations, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma.
She was the Director of the Gynecologic Oncology Fellowship Program at Massachusetts General Hospital from 1998 through 2017. She is the past president of The Obstetrical Society of Boston and of the New England Society of Gynecologic Oncologists. She is also a member of the Ethics Committee at Massachusetts General Hospital.
She is a member of the national Trauma and Critical Care Team, a branch of the US department of Health and Human Services and has deployed to various international disasters. Since 2008, she has been consulting in Bangladesh on cervical cancer prevention and the development of medical infrastructure to care for women with gynecologic cancers. She has also developed a two-month observership in gynecologic oncology at MGH for physicians from resource-limited countries.
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Jessica Haberer, MD, MS
Associate Professor of Medicine, Director or Research for the MGH Center for Global Health
Mentor areas: Medication adherence, global health partnership equity, use of technology for behavioral science
Willing to shadow: Yes
Read More...Jessica Haberer, MD, MS, received a medical degree from Yale University and a master's degree in Health Services Research from Stanford University. She completed an internship and residency in Internal Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. After finishing her training, Dr. Haberer worked for the William J. Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative in Beijing, China, where she served as a Clinical and Research Advisor to the Chinese National Center for AIDS, Division of Treatment and Care. Upon returning to the United States, she joined the faculty in the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco as a Clinical Educator. Dr. Haberer developed in interest in adherence to HIV antiretroviral therapy (ART) while in China and began studying multiple measures of ART adherence among children and adults in developing settings. Dr. Haberer joined the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Global Health and Harvard Medical School in 2008. Her work focuses on the study of real-time adherence monitoring and intervention strategies for ART and pre-exposure prophylaxis against HIV infection; more recent work has translated these strategies for adherence to treatment and prevention of tuberculosis. Current projects are based in Uganda and Kenya.
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Ingrid Katz, MD, MHS
Associate Faculty Director, Harvard Global Health Institute; Assistant Professor, HMS; Associate Physician, BWH
Mentor areas: HIV, Socio-behavioral research, community-based participatory research, implementation science
Willing to shadow: Yes
Read More...Dr. Ingrid Katz, MD, MHS, is the Associate Faculty Director at the Harvard Global Health Institute, an Assistant Professor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and an Associate Physician in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital. She is also 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. She 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 is the recipient of the Burke Fellowship, the Eleanor and Miles Shore Award, a Center for AIDS Research Scholar Award, and was a 2019 recipient of the Clifford Barger Excellence in Mentoring Award at Harvard Medical School. 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.
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Stephanie Kayden, MD, MPH
Vice Chair and Chief, Division of International Emergency Medicine and Humanitarian Programs, Department of Emergency Medicine, BWH
Mentor areas: Humanitarian response; refugee health; international humanitarian law; international emergency medicine leadership development; travel security
Willing to shadow: Yes
Read More...Stephanie Kayden, MD, MPH, is Vice Chair and Chief of the Division of International Emergency Medicine and Humanitarian Programs in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She is an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Professor of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness. As Director of the Lavine Family Humanitarian Studies Initiative at the Humanitarian Academy at Harvard, she trains professionals from around the world in global health and humanitarian work. Dr. Kayden has worked to improve emergency medical systems, humanitarian aid and disaster response in more than 40 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.
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Roseanna H. Means, MD, MSc
Medicine Attending, Women's Health and Medical Director, Bridges to Moms
Mentor areas: Social justice, health equity, homelessness among women, social determinants of health
Willing to shadow: Yes
Read More...Roseanna H. Means MD, MSc has been a primary care physician on the staff of Brigham & Women's Hospital since 1984. She is a senior staff Attending in the Division of Women’s Health and an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Means is the Founder and President of Health Care Without Walls (HCWW), a non-profit organization of volunteer physicians and staff nurses who have provided free medical care and care coordination for homeless and battered women and families in Boston since 1999. In 2016 she launched Bridges to Moms,a partnership between HCWW and BWH, a program that addresses social determinants of health for homeless pregnant women, closing gaps in care and improving birth outcomes.
She has been recognized for distinguished community service by Massachusetts Medical Society, Health Care for All, MIT Alumni Association, Tufts University Alumni Association, and Harvard Medical School. In 2008, Dr. Means was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters by Babson College. In 2010, she was recognized as a Community Health Leader by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and in 2011, she was named a CNN Hero. In 2012, she was recognized as a Woman of Courage and Conviction by the Boston Chapter of the National Council of Negro Women and in 2017, was named one of Boston’s Top Doctors by Boston Magazine.
Prior to launching HCWW, Dr. Means was the Program Medical Director of the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, where she was also the Medical Director of the Barbara McInnis House, a residential recuperative facility for homeless persons.
A graduate of MIT (BS and MSc) and Tufts University School of Medicine (MD), she completed her residency in Internal Medicine at the Brigham and Women's Hospital.
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Michelle Morse, MD, MPH
Founding Co-Director, EqualHealth
Mentor areas: Global health, medical education, social medicine, community organizing
Willing to shadow: yes
Read More...Dr. Michelle Morse works to rethink and advance medical education globally, expand the teaching of social medicine in the US and abroad, and to support health systems strengthening through equitable approaches to human resources for health. She serves as an internal medicine hospitalist, Founding Co-Director of EqualHealth, and social medicine course director at Harvard Medical School. Previously, she served for three years as deputy chief medical officer at Partners In Health (PIH) and as Assistant Program Director for the Internal Medicine Residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and now serves on the Board of Directors of PIH. In 2015 Dr. Morse worked with several partners to found the Social Medicine Consortium (SMC), a global coalition of over 1000 people representing over 50 universities and organizations in twelve countries, which seeks to use activism and disruptive pedagogy rooted in social medicine to address the miseducation of health professionals on the root causes of illness. In 2018, Dr. Morse was awarded a Soros Equality Fellowship to work on the SMC’s global Campaign Against Racism. Dr. Morse earned her B.S. in French in 2003 from the University of Virginia, her M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 2008, and her MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health in May 2012.
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Brett D. Nelson, MD, MPH, DTM&H
Associate Professor, HMS; Pediatrician and Newborn Hospitalist, MGH
Mentor areas: Global health education, pediatric global health, newborn health, newborn resuscitation
Willing to shadow: Yes
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Brett D. Nelson, MD, MPH, DTM&H is a pediatrician and public health professional (Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School; Associate Pediatrician, Massachusetts General Hospital) whose interests are advocacy and health care provision for vulnerable populations, particularly children and individuals affected by poverty, conflict, and crisis. His work in these disciplines has included clinical care, program development, advocacy, education, and needs-based research in dozens of countries.
His training includes MD and MPH degrees from Johns Hopkins, with MPH concentrations in humanitarian assistance and human rights, and an advanced diploma in tropical medicine from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Dr Nelson completed his pediatric training in the Boston Combined Residency Program in Pediatrics (Harvard Medical School / Boston University School of Medicine). Following residency training, he helped develop the nation’s first Pediatric Global Health Fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital. In his capacity as the first fellow, Dr Nelson served as the Senior Pediatrician for the Liberian Ministry of Health and as the Chair of Pediatrics and Newborn Medicine at Liberia’s sole teaching hospital. Working with his local Liberian colleagues, he led efforts in establishing pediatric and newborn care and training in a post-conflict country without pediatricians.
Since the early 1990s, Dr Nelson has also been involved in significant academic research and program management in over a dozen disrupted areas (e.g., central, eastern, and western Africa, the Balkans, Middle East, Haiti, etc.) while working for organizations such as the CDC, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, International Rescue Committee, International Red Cross and Red Crescent, Unicef, and Médecins Sans Frontières. This work has included pediatric clinical care, country-wide maternal-newborn-child health programs, health services development, HIV/AIDS surveillance in conflict-affected regions, as well as the establishment of clinical training programs stateside and in low- and middle-income countries. He also led the development of innovative methodologies for the assessment of health services in resource-limited settings. This novel participatory approach integrates qualitative and quantitative methods and has now been successfully applied to many diverse settings. Dr Nelson's academic accomplishments have been recognized in many international conference presentations and in over 80 peer-reviewed publications, including first-authored articles in leading journals such as Pediatrics, World Health and Population, and Journal of Graduate Medical Education. He directs a popular global health and tropical medicine course at Harvard Medical School, Clinical Topics in Global Health (SM520.0) and is the editor of a commissioned Wiley-Blackwell textbook, Essential Clinical Global Health (www.bit.ly/ECGHbn).
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James (Jim) O'Connell, MD
President, Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program; Assistant Professor of Medicine, Boston University School of Medicine
Mentor areas:
Willing to shadow:
Read More...Dr. O’Connell graduated from the University of Notre Dame, received a masters degree from Cambridge University, and earned his MD at Harvard Medical School in 1982. He completed his residency in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1985 and is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at HMS. Upon finishing residency, Dr. O'Connell became a founding physician of the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program. He has worked full-time with homeless persons for over 30 years and is president of BHCHP, which now serves over 12,000 homeless men, women and children each year in two hospital clinics (Boston Medical Center and Massachusetts General Hospital) complemented by direct clinical services in over 60 shelters and other outreach sites in Boston. In September 1985, Dr. O’Connell and BHCHP opened the country’s first medical respite program for homeless persons with 25 beds located within the Lemuel Shattuck Shelter, which has grown into the Barbara McInnis House, a 104-bed freestanding program that provides acute and sub-acute, peri-operative, rehabilitative and recuperative, and palliative and end-of-life care for homeless men and women who would otherwise require costly hospitalizations. Working with the MGH Laboratory of Computer Science, Dr. O’Connell designed and implemented the nation’s first computerized medical record for a homeless program in 1995. From 1989 until 1996, Dr. O'Connell served as the National Program Director of the Homeless Families Program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Dr. O’Connell is the editor of The Health Care of Homeless Persons: A Manual of Communicable Diseases and Common Problems in Shelters and on the Streets, and an editor of A Practical Approach to Pulmonary Medicine. His articles have appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Circulation, the Journal of Clinical Ethics, and several other medical journals. He was featured on ABC’s Nightline and is the subject of a full length documentary entitled "Give Me a Shot of Anything.” He is also the author of a book entitled Stories from the Shadows: Reflections of a Street Doctor, published in 2015 and featured on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross. He has received numerous awards during his career, including the Trustees' Medal at MGH's bicentennial celebration in 2011 and the Humanitarian Award from the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship in 2012.
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Kristian Olson, MD, MPH, DTM&H
Director, MGH Solutions Lab/Consortium for Affordable Medical Technology (CAMTech)
Mentor areas: Technology Development in Low Resource Settings, Human Centered Design
Willing to shadow: Yes
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Kris Olson is both a Pediatrician and Internist and has served as a member of the Core Educator Faculty in the Department of Medicine since its founding in 2005. He is the Director of the Consortium for Affordable Medical Technologies (CAMTech) in the MGH Center for Global Health, the Director of the MGH Solutions Lab and an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. He is an architect of CAMTech as an open innovation platform that facilitates Patient Driven Innovations from ideation to impact. He has worked extensively in low and middle-income countries as well as the US to develop medical solutions focused on value. Kris is a serial innovator, has several patents, a licensed technology, and has started both non-profit and for-profit ventures to accelerate ideas to implementation.
In 2009, he was named to the Scientific American Top 10 Honor Roll as an individual who has demonstrated leadership in applying new technologies and biomedical discoveries for the benefit of humanity and, in March of 2019, the Society for Hospital Medicine bestowed Kris with their Excellence in Humanitarian Services Award.
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Joe Rhatigan, MD
Director, BWH Global Health Equity Residency Program
Mentor areas: medical education, global health care delivery
Willing to shadow: No
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Joseph Rhatigan, MD is the director of the Global Health Equity Residency Program at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital where he is associate chief of the Division of Global Health Equity. Dr Rhatigan graduated from Harvard Medical School, completed his residency in Internal Medicine at BWH, and practices hospital medicine. He has written numerous case studies of global health care delivery projects and teaches a course on health care delivery in low-resource settings at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health. He co-directs the Harvard Summer Intensive Program in Global Health Delivery
Joseph Rhatigan, MD is the director of the Global Health Equity Residency Program at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital where he is associate chief of the Division of Global Health Equity. Dr Rhatigan graduated from Harvard Medical School, completed his residency in Internal Medicine at BWH, and practices hospital medicine. He has written numerous case studies of global health care delivery projects and teaches a course on health care delivery in low-resource settings at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health. He co-directs the Harvard Summer Intensive Program in Global Health Delivery.
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Alexander Tsai, MD, PhD
Associate Professor of Psychiatry, HMS
Mentor areas: global psychiatry, research (clinical, health services, population health, qualitative)
Willing to shadow: Yes and no - my clinical work isn't really appropriate for shadowing. However, I do facilitate "shadowing" of sorts for trainees interested in conducting research at our study site in Mbara, Uganda
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Dr. Alexander Tsai is a board-certified psychiatrist at the Massachusetts General Hospital; Associate Director for Trainee Development in the Chester M. Pierce, MD Division of Global Psychiatry; and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Through his research, he seeks to understand how large-scale social forces such as violence, stigma, and food and water insecurity conspire to undermine health and mental health among the poor and excluded. His study sties are distributed globally, including South Africa, Uganda, and the U.S. In 2011, Dr. Tsai received the American Psychiatric Association's Health Services Research Early Career Award, which is given annually to a single psychiatrist under the age of 40. His research has been disseminated in more than 150 peer-reviewed publications, including the Annals of Internal Medicine, JAMA Psychiatry, the New England Journal of Medicine, and Public Library of Science Medicine. His recent research on police violence and population health was identified by the Clinical Research Forum as one of the top 20 contributions to science in 2018 and also was designated the Best Published Research Paper of the Year for 2018 by the Society of General Internal Medicine. Prior to his appointment at Mass General, he completed a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholas postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University and his residency training in general adult psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco.
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Patrick Vinck, PhD
Director, Harvard Humanitarian's Initiative; Assistant professor, HMS
Mentor areas: Humanitarian action, conflict and peace building, field methods in emergencies
Willing to shadow: N/A
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Patrick Vinck is Assistant Professor at the Harvard Medical School and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Director of Research of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI), a university-wide academic and research center that brings an interdisciplinary approach to promoting understanding of complex humanitarian crisis and to developing evidence-based approaches to humanitarian assistance. His current research examines resilience, peacebuilding, and social cohesion in contexts of mass violence, conflicts and natural disasters. His research has lead him to examine the use and ethics of data technology in the field.
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