Degree program: MPH (Applied Epidemiology)

Mary is interested in infectious disease epidemiology and control in low-resource and conflict settings. Before coming to Gillings, she studied economics at Wellesley College then worked for three years at the Medical Practice Evaluation Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, modeling the health impacts and cost-effectiveness of different care strategies for HIV opportunistic infections such as cryptococcal meningitis and TB. At HHI, she is working with CFK Africa, a Kenya-based NGO that provides health care, education, and economic opportunities to people living in informal settlements to support monitoring and evaluation of their public health programs.

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Degree program: PhD in Maternal and Child Health (epidemiology minor)

Aparna Kachoria is a doctoral student in the MCH department. Before joining UNC, she received her MPH in global health epidemiology from the University of Michigan and spent five years working in quality improvement, health services research, and overseeing mental health research studies in Central Massachusetts. Her current research interests include maternal empowerment and perinatal mental health, and improving overall health equity and quality both globally and here in the US. Aparna is currently a research assistant on two studies; an intervention to reduce hypertension in pregnancy in North Carolina and a project to better understand adverse childhood outcomes and perinatal depression in rural Pakistan. At HHI, Aparna works with a humanitarian partner in Sudan on their mixed methods monitoring and evaluation efforts to assess current programs and develop a long-term strategy to improve access, effectiveness and resource allocation of multiple programs and interventions.

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Degree Program: Dual Degree MSEE/MSCRP

Laura has a background in Biological and Agricultural Engineering, earning her BS from NC State. She is interested in humanitarian work dealing with water quality, quantity, and access. Particularly the intersection with how city planning and climate change will affect water resources in the future. As an HHI intern, she is working with AMOS Health and Hope, a Nicaragua-based primary healthcare NGO to provide analytic support, research, education and training to staff related to WASH and other pertinent issues.

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Degree program: MPH (Maternal, Child, and Family Health)

Melissa is interested in global child health, particularly in developing countries, and the management of chronic diseases in children. She earned her medical degree from Tec de Monterrey in Mexico. She then completed a year of social service providing medical care in the rural community of San Jacinto, Linares, which solidified her commitment to addressing health disparities and improving healthcare delivery in underserved populations. As a Gillings HHI intern, Melissa is collaborating with Casa Alitas, a humanitarian aid organization in Southern Arizona. Casa Alitas provides crucial support and shelter to asylum seekers crossing the nearby border. In her role, she contributes to immigration policy research and the development of improved health services for the organization's guests, aiming to improve their overall well-being and access to care.

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Founded in 2007, this community-based Nicaraguan NGO fosters community empowerment to treat illness, prevent disease and strengthen local health leadership through training and supporting community health workers. During the past 15 years over 670 CHWs and volunteers have provided primary and preventive healthcare activities in 25 rural and urban communities in Nicaragua. AMOS focuses on improving health for pregnant women, newborns, children under 5, and people with chronic conditions. The AMOS-UNC project is focused on monitoring and evaluation, specifically to examine the impact of programs to date and to help in the redesign to optimize benefit to communities.

The State of Palestine is affected by a protracted crisis; currently, 2.5 million people, including 1.2 million children, living in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank need humanitarian assistance. Gaza has suffered from isolation causing constraints to advance capability within higher education institutions. The Gaza-based University thus requested an academic partnership with UNC Gillings to facilitate knowledge transfer to build capacity among selected Gaza-based University faculty and staff, as well as the Ministry of Health. Several Gillings professors, including HHI advisors, have begun piloting an open-university virtual lecture series.

This long-established Syrian NGO responds to the many and diverse challenges faced by marginalized groups affected by the Syrian Crisis including difficult-to-reach areas, where there are internally displaced and war-afflicted persons as well as refugees returning to their communities after many years of living outside Syria. SSSD actively intervenes at an individual person, household and community level with specialized programs to alleviate the suffering, identify and provide for unmet basic living requirements, and address medical and development needs. Programs include health, WaSH, psychosocial support, shelter, social protection, infrastructure, vocational training and livelihood generation, as well as informal educational programs for children and adults. The UNC service project is supporting the development and operations of health care programs with design of health-related records and data sets to monitor, expand and improve patient care.

Sierra Leone has the highest maternal mortality rate in the world and an expected lifespan of just 52 years. Rural Health care Initiative is an NGO that partners with the Tikonko Chiefdom in Sierra Leone to advance existing maternal and child health services through community-based solutions including two Birth Homes for Mothers for safe deliveries and a Children’s Health Program. Through outreach motorcycle clinics in rural villages, family planning and antenatal care is provided as well as care for children under age 5. Most common conditions for treatment of children include acute illness, immunizations, arranging hospital care for critically ill children as well as a comprehensive program for moderate and severe malnutrition. The UNC service project includes developing the evidence base and understanding of best practices as well as qualitative assessment to improve access and effectiveness of health services.

Casa Alitas, also known as the Alitas Program of Catholic Community Services (CCS), is a humanitarian aid project committed to providing assistance to asylum-seekers released from ICE and Border Patrol detention into the local community of Tucson, AZ. As of August 2023, Casa Alitas had served over 350,000 asylum-seekers. Casa Alitas partners with UNHCR, Church World Service, Save the Children, the Kino Border Initiative and other local non-profit and community groups to serve migrants who have entered the USA after release from detention or border patrol and who are legally seeking asylum. HHI supports Casa Alitas by contributing to their immigration policy advocacy efforts, supporting the development of improved health services for guests, and creating service and research opportunities for medical and public health students.

This project, initiated in 2015, supports the WHO National Quality Policy and Strategy Initiative---a global program (NQPS) for which Professor Sheila Leatherman serves as the Lead Advisor. The NQPS program has developed the conceptual frameworks, evidence –based interventions and supporting tools and resources to be used by low- and middle-income countries across the world. This program provides policy guidance as well as field based technical assistance. Further research and global consultation resulted in the publication of additional WHO guidance for quality in fragile, conflict-affected and vulnerable settings which was published in 2019 and is being implemented in numerous countries. UNC is also a primary partner for developing a global country-level comparative data dashboard for quality metrics across lower resourced and fragile countries. Multiple UNC-WHO collaborative peer-reviewed publications are available describing the context, methods, and findings of this portfolio of work.

Sudan, a country of 46 million people, has experienced conflict and multiple humanitarian crises for decades. Since April 2023, with the most recent internal conflict, about 8 million people have been displaced. According to UNHCR, the humanitarian situation is dire; inadequate food, water and fuel with limited communications and electricity. Save the Children reports up to nine million children are facing food shortages. Access to health care is critically affected: the WHO health cluster reports that 70% of health facilities in conflict zones are non-functioning. The global humanitarian response organization, Alight (previously American Refugee Committee) has worked in Sudan for several decades to scale health programming through multiple primary healthcare facilities, serving nearly one million people, including displaced populations. In 2022, Alight requested an academic partnership with UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health to help with ongoing monitoring and evaluation efforts to quantify the scale and efficacy of the services they have historically provided, to assess current programs and to recommend future strategies for improved service delivery in the context of acute and protracted crises. The UNC Humanitarian Health Initiative works with a multidisciplinary team in Sudan to conduct applied mixed-methods research and is developing a 5-year strategic plan.

Students were able to meet with Warner Passanisi, a local humanitarian who has decades of global experience. He most recently worked in Poland with Ukranian refugees. Students were able to hear from Warner, ask questions, and seek advice for humanitarian careers.

A showing of Bending the Arc and distribution of free copies of Mountains beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder was conducted in conjunction with the Gillings Student Global Health Committee in memory of Dr. Paul Farmer.

The Gillings Humanitarian Health Initiative Seminar Series focused on the safety and security for health care workers and facilities in humanitarian settings. Panelists include Dr. Dilshad Jaff, Gillings Humanitarian Fellow and Adjunct Associate Professor and Dr. Benjamin Meier, Professor of Global Health Policy and UNC-Chapel Hill.

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UNC Gillings alumna Anna Freeman, RN, MPH, nurse and quality improvement specialist, shared her humanitarian field experiences and work to improve quality of care with Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders.

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Dr. Dilshad Jaff, the Gillings Humanitarian Health Fellow, presented on his field experience working with the International Committee of the Red Cross in South Sudan.