Under the Thomas Francis Jr. Global Health Fellowship program, School of Public Health and other UW health sciences students are working across the globe to improve people's lives.

Engi Attia – School of Public Health / UW Medicine
Engi Attia is a pulmonary/critical care fellow at the University of Washington, pursuing a Master of Public Health degree in Epidemiology. She studied International Public Health at Rice University's Baker Institute of Public Policy and has volunteered in refugee clinics and the Coptic Hospital in Nairobi, Kenya. Working with the Coptic Hospital Hope Center in Nairobi, she will examine chronic lung disease among adolescents with vertically-acquired HIV. The Francis Fellowship will support travel to Nairobi and collection of demographic and clinical data. This work will establish a foundation for future research and collaboration as Engi develops her career as a globally oriented physician-epidemiologist with expertise in HIV-related pulmonary disease.

Gena Barnabee – School of Public Affairs / School of Public Health
Gena is currently pursuing a joint MPH-Global Health in the Schools of Public Health and Medicine and an MPA in the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs. She is currently a Research Assistant with the Department of Global Health's Strategic Analysis and Research Training Program. She recently completed two years as a Peace Corps Masters International volunteer in Cameroon. With support from the Francis Fellowship and Health Alliance International (HAI), Gena will conduct research about midwife acceptance of Liga Inan, HAI's new mobile health (mHealth) pilot intervention, which is designed to improve maternal and neonatal health through better one-way and two-way communications between midwives and their patients. She plans to conduct fieldwork in Timor-Leste for 10 weeks in the fall of 2013 and submit the research as her Master's thesis in Spring 2014.

María Echavarría – School of Public Health
María I. Echavarría is a Colombian microbiologist and a current MPH Global Health student. She has worked for more than 10 years in health programs with public and private hospitals in Colombia, providing training to infectious disease care teams in the use of microbiological data to support clinical decisions.

During summer 2013, Maria will do her practicum at the Pan American Health Organization in Washington D.C as part of the team evaluating a five-year program to prevent HIV among young people in six countries in Central America and the Caribbean. She will be structuring the conceptual framework and developing the data collection and analysis instruments for evaluating this program.

Jean Marie (Rikerdy) Frederic – School of Public Health
Rikerdy Frederic MD, is an MPH candidate on the Leadership Policy and Management track in the Department of Global Health. He also works part-time as a Senior Technical Advisor at I-TECH. Rikerdy, an obstetrician and gynecologist, was Deputy Director of I-TECH Haiti for five year. He worked seven years at Hospital Albert Schweitzer in Deschapelles, Haiti, as OBGYN specialist and then Chief of service to provide emergency obstetrical care to high-risk maternity patients.

Haiti has the highest maternal mortality in the Western Hemisphere. The Francis Fellowship will allow Rikerdy to conduct research on barriers to access to emergency obstetrical care for women in rural Haiti and investigate the acceptability of community-based health care as a way to expand coverage for services and reduce maternal mortality.

Solomon Lubinga – School of Pharmacy
Solomon is a pharmacist from Uganda and a first-year doctoral student in the Pharmaceutical Outcomes Research and Policy Program. He holds an MS degree in Clinical Pharmacy from the University of Strathclyde in the UK. With the Francis Fellowship, Solomon will head to Uganda to work at Butabika hospital, the national referral hospital for mental and neurological disorders, where he will conduct research on the economic burden of mental illness in Uganda.

Marita Mann – School of Pharmacy
After working for several years in the pharmaceutical industry in process development engineering, Marita changed careers and earned an MPH from Brown University. Her research there was in global health, specifically on drug resistance to HIV drugs in Kenya, as well as on opioid abuse throughout the U.S.

In 2012 Marita began working towards a PhD in the Pharmaceutical Outcomes Research and Policy Program. In this department she can focus on all three of her areas of interest: pharmacoepidemiology, health economics, and policy.

This summer, Marita will use the Francis Fellowship to travel to Namibia. She will be working with the School of Pharmacy at the University of Namibia as well as with the Ministry of Health and Social Services to increase in-country manufacturing of pharmaceuticals. She will focus on development of a training curriculum and capacity of a pilot plant in the context of costs and process development.

Alastair Matheson – School of Public Health
Alastair Matheson is a PhD student in the Epidemiology Department where his research focuses on dengue fever in east Africa. He has a MPH from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, but also completed the international health sub-specialty while on exchange at the University of California at Berkeley. Alastair has worked for several years in local public health in New Zealand and the United States on informatics, program design and evaluation, and policy development. He will use the Francis Fellowship to travel to Kenya to collect data to help develop a tool enabling health workers in resource-limited settings to make better diagnostic choices when treating patients with fever.

Anna Walton – School of Medicine
Anna Walton is a first-year medical student in Global Health, Hispanic Health, and Underserved Pathways with a particular interest in racial/ethnic health disparities, immigrant health, and women's health. She graduated magna cum laude in 2010 with Honors from the Honors College of the University of South Carolina with a double major in Biological Sciences and Spanish. In 2011, she completed a Graduate Certificate in Women's and Gender Studies.

Her research and community engagement work have included a community health worker intervention to decrease the burden of breast and cervical cancer in the Latina community, health advocacy with migrant farmworkers, and legal and psychological support for Latino/a and rural survivors of sexual violence. The Francis Fellowship will allow her to work with Pronto International and the Centro de Investigación Epidemiológica en Salud Sexual y Reproductiva in Guatemala to evaluate the care women receive during labor and delivery in Huehuetenango, El Quichè, San Marcos, and Alta Verapaz, four rural districts with the highest maternal mortality ratio in Guatemala.