Healthier Mothers and Babies

Lillian Benjamin, center, with local health workers in Gabon.

Children under 20 days old were dying in parts of Gabon, and it was a mystery to local health officials. With funding from a Thomas Francis Jr. Global Health Fellowship, Lillian Benjamin set out to find some answers. "The hospital had no idea why this was happening," said Benjamin, a 2008 graduate of the UW School of Public Health.

Benjamin spent five months in Lambaréné, a city of more than 20,000 just south of the equator, where she worked at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital, which was founded by the Nobel Peace Prize winner nearly a century ago. Before her fellowship, Benjamin said, the hospital wasn't tracking mothers or babies adequately. Health workers had no idea if the mothers they were seeing had previously been screened for HIV, malaria or other diseases. By reviewing public records, she also found that pregnant women waited too long to seek care, or were delivering their babies at home. When babies got sick, the mothers didn't know what to do.

The Albert Schweitzer hospital now tracks women and their newborns, giving health workers better information to save lives. They can even follow up on a mother who was due to deliver but who never showed up to the hospital.

Funding from the Francis Fellowship was crucial for Benjamin's travel and ability to conduct research, she said. "It was an amazing experience," said Benjamin, who also earned a master's in international studies at the UW. "It gave me the opportunity to find my own research and actually go out and do it."

Benjamin currently works in the Democratic Republic of Congo for USAID as a health technical officer. She is one of nearly two dozen UW graduate or professional students who have been awarded Thomas Francis Jr. Global Health Fellowships to pursue global health projects.

Project Bright Smiles

Natalie Hale, left, improved access to dental care in Quezon City, Manila.

Natalie Hale, a UW medical student from Juneau, AK, used her fellowship funds to help set up a community dental-care system in the Philippines. She worked in an urban village in Quezon City, Manila, in the summer of 2010 and at first thought she would focus on environmental pollution. But then she saw how many cavities everyone had.

"A lot of the kids had pretty bad tooth decay," said Hale, who is also pursuing an MPH in Health Services. "It was pretty shocking to me."

Using an existing network of health-care volunteers, Hale set up a program to connect children and their parents with dentists and other health-care services. Dentists came to the village to screen and treat children, while health-care volunteers were trained how to educate parents and children. Hale set up a monthly tracking system, where a prize is given to the child with the best eating and brushing habits. Colgate Philippines donated dental supplies.

Called Project Bright Smiles, the program is still in place two years later, and Hale checks on it monthly. "They're still going strong," she said. Hale's research was published in the Journal of Investigative Medicine, and she presented her paper at the Western Student Medical Research Forum in Carmel, CA, where she won the Klea D. Bertakis Award for Excellence in Research.

Fighting HIV in Asia

Diego Solares, right, worked with UNAIDS in Bangkok.

Diego Solares spent two months in Bangkok last summer with the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). He worked for the regional program advisor and created fact sheets on HIV and men who have sex with men (MSM).

Solares, who completed coursework for an MPH at the UW in Global Health, provided research and designed easy-to-read backgrounders on the problem in Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. The idea was to help advocates and policy-makers work on intervention strategies to prevent the spread of HIV. HIV prevalence among MSM in Thailand was as high as 30 percent in 2007. "That is a number that is higher than most places in Africa," Solares said. "It's really quite shocking."

Solares is a native of Guatemala who grew up in Boston and California. He is studying for a master's in public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and is eyeing a career at the UN level. He was recently asked by the UN Development Program to design more MSM backgrounders for South Asia, including India, Bangladesh and Nepal. "I'm beginning to see just how beneficial this experience has been to my career," Solares said.

Saving Pedestrian Lives

Alex Quistberg studied pedestrian safety in Lima.

In Lima, Peru, Alex Quistberg studied pedestrian safety for nearly six months starting in 2010. Traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for children aged 5 to 14 in Peru, and the second-leading cause of death for people between 15 and 44. About 3,500 pedestrians are killed each year, said Quistberg, a Utah native who earned his MPH in 2007 at SPH and is now a doctoral student in epidemiology.

Quistberg studied police reports and visited major intersections, tracking such things as pedestrian traffic signals, pedestrian bridges and the location of bus stops. He is now compiling the data for his dissertation, and plans to share his research with colleagues in Peru as well as with national police, urban designers and highway engineers.

He hopes his work will change the current design practices at intersections and spur police to enforce pedestrian safety laws. "One of the easiest things I think my research could change fairly quickly is the timing of the traffic signals," he said. "So far I have found that pedestrians are not given near enough time to cross some of the busier intersections."

Helping Namibia's First Pharmacy School

Elise Fields promoted drug safety in Namibia.

Elise Fields, a fourth-year UW Pharmacy student from Michigan, recently spent six weeks in Namibia, where she worked on several projects, including one that could lead to safer drugs. She collected reports about patients who had adverse reactions to certain medications – mostly HIV-related drugs – and entered information into a database for the World Health Organization. She also wrote a report on drug safety for the Ministry of Health's Therapeutics Information and Pharmacovigilance Center, based at Windhoek Central Hospital in the country's capital.

Fields helped out at the national's first pharmacy school, which opened last year at the University of Namibia. She did so by sharing clinical experiences with new faculty and developing a survey of local pharmacists and their expectations for mentoring students.

Better Access to Medical Records

Francisco Saavedra, left, worked on better access to electronic records.

In Mexico, Francisco Saavedra worked on a system that would allow doctors to access electronic medical records more efficiently, potentially improving the quality of life and health outcomes for patients across the globe. His "Electronic Medical Records without Borders" project was a joint effort between the UW and the University of Guanajuato Campus in León.

The current system of medical records "often lacks global access, standardization and efficient interface," Saavedra said, and as a result, there isn't enough information available, especially on migrants. "This project will significantly facilitate the access to medical records and data transfer for these migrant populations on both sides of the border."

Saavedra, a physician from Mexico, plans to apply his hands-on research towards his PhD dissertation in biomedical informatics at the UW. He said the fellowship experience "will reshape, redefine and prepare me for the direction I want to take my future academic, research and clinical activities."

About the Program

The Thomas Francis Jr. Global Health Fund Endowment Student Fellowship program began in 2008 and is administered by the Department of Global Health. It provides current, fulltime UW graduate or professional students with practical, problem-solving experience and covers up to $4,000 in travel costs, including room and board.

Students from numerous disciplines – geography, law, public health, social welfare and others – have taken part. Projects have been carried out in more than a dozen countries, from Bolivia to Timor-Leste.

The fellowship was named in honor of Thomas Francis Jr., a physician, virologist and epidemiologist who isolated the human flu virus. Francis taught vaccine development at the University of Michigan to Jonas Salk, who later developed the polio vaccine.

Major contributors to the fellowship have included the epidemiologist William Foege, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Marguerite Casey Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Want to get involved in this project? Make a gift today in support of the future Francis Fellows to the Thomas Francis Jr., Global Health Fund Endowed Student Fellowship. For any questions about gifts to this fund and the School of Public Health, please contact Megan Lynn at mlynn25@uw.edu.

All photos courtesy of the Thomas Francis Jr. Fellows Program.