IHSJ 2009 Summer Interns

PIH's Institute for Health and Social Justice (IHSJ) features an internship program each summer for a select number of students and professionals early in their careers who are interested in learning about current issues in health and social justice. The 2009 interns worked on a wide variety of PIH projects, including researching a psychosocial intervention for the children of parents living with HIV/AIDS in Haiti, creating a training curriculum for community health workers, and writing grants. Read more about them and their individual projects and accomplishments:

Reem Abu-Libdeh graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia with a degree in English literature, then toiled in book publishing for a few years before deciding to pursue a medical career. Since then, she has worked with underserved communities in both the Middle East and Boston. This summer, she worked with the Communications team, where she wrote and edited articles for the e-Bulletin, edited materials for the website, and collected information for PIH’s annual report. Reem also writes for OpenForum, a blog supported by the community of Health and Human Rights: An International Journal.

Victor Melt Campos is a general practitioner focused on primary care. Originally from Peru, he graduated from the Medical School at the National University of Cajamarca in 2002. In 2005, he was awarded an International Ford Foundation Fellowship, which offers postgraduate studies to leaders from underserved communities who have demonstrated social commitment and academic achievement. As a result, Victor completed his master’s degree at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he focused on global health and public health policy analysis. At PIH, he worked on the Latin American and Caribbean Initiative for the Integration of Prenatal Care with Testing and Treatment of HIV and Syphilis project. He focused his research on the perinatal and neonatal clinical history form aspect. Victor aspires to continue working in global health and social justice and hopes to contribute to population-based medicine, especially for underserved communities, and help foster an international community focused on global health. He believes that physicians must be aware of not only the biological risk factors but also the behavioral and environmental factors that can affect health.

Max Clermont is concentrating in community health and development studies at Brown University. As the Haiti program management intern, Max's internship focused on organizing one-page summary sheets on each of PIH’s sites in Haiti, researching aquaculture, and accompanying patients of the Right to Health Care program on their appointments. He also edited the Zanmi Agrikol webpage, which highlights Zanmi Lasante's agricultural initiatives in Haiti. In addition, Max organized payroll, assembled PIH’s 2009 headcount database, and provided Haitian Creole translation when needed. Max hopes to complete his MPH in international health at Brown and deepen his interests in social justice and human rights before continuing on to medical school.

Erin Cory interned this summer with PIH's Training department. She will receive her MPH in health promotion and disease prevention from Florida International University’s Stempel School of Public Health upon completion of her internship. Erin assisted the Training team with the development of the PIH Program Management Guide, which will be available on the website in early 2010. Her major responsibilities included researching literature to support the guide, updating the glossary and acronym index, and assisting in the transcription of field interviews from PIH’s sites in Rwanda, Malawi, and Lesotho. This guide will be a useful tool for both PIH program managers and external partners working to promote a preferential option for the poor.

Jeff DeFlavio graduated from George Washington University in 2008 with a degree in philosophy. As an undergraduate he cofounded Banaa.org, a scholarship program that matches Sudanese survivors of atrocity with scholarship opportunities in the United States, empowering them with the skills and resources necessary to address the grievances that fuel Sudan's cycles of violence. He recently returned from the Gambia, in West Africa, where he worked as a deputy administrator in a rural government hospital. At PIH, he worked in Institutional Development, conducting research, composing annual reports, and writing grants. A highlight of Jeff's internship was writing a successful grant application for $10,000 to support community health workers in rural Haiti. He will begin medical school next fall.

Judy Fitzpatrick is studying international relations and global health at Tufts University. As an intern with the Human Resources team, she designed a website for PIH staff to access benefits information, forms, and company policies. The second part of her project consisted of researching the recruitment processes of other nonprofits,including Médecins Sans Frontières, Management Sciences for Health, Pathfinder International, the Clinton Foundation, and Oxfam America. After college, she hopes to study medicine and work in global public health.

Brian Goldner graduated from Emory University in May 2008 with degrees in mathematics, economics, and sociology. At PIH, he worked with the Electronic Medical Records team to transfer medical data input forms from Microsoft InfoPath to a newly developed HTML form entry system. Brian hopes to pursue graduate studies in public health.

Katie Gunter spent her summer internship working with the Prevention and Access to Care and Treatment (PACT) project, which serves the sickest and most marginalized HIV patients in Boston. Her internship focused on supporting activities related to PACT's expansion of a home-based community health worker intervention to provide support to patients living with diseases other than HIV/AIDS, specifically diabetes. She assisted in the development of curricular materials, forms, and program evaluation tools for the diabetes project. She also developed a qualitative research tool to explore patients’ beliefs about diabetes, based upon an explanatory model of illness, and to elicit patients’ perspectives on different ways of understanding diabetes, its consequences, and how best to treat it. She is finishing her MPH/MSW at the University of Michigan and hopes to use her degree and experiences from PACT to support community-based participatory research and the growth of community health worker programs throughout the United States. 

Sarah Hook is a graduate student at the University of Denver. At PIH, she worked under Dr. Mary Kay Smith Fawzi on a research project—a feasibility study of a psychosocial intervention for the children of parents living with HIV/AIDS in Haiti. Sarah assisted in the data analysis and review of literature for the study, which found the intervention to be very successful. She will be returning to Colorado to finish her degree in international development with a certificate in global health and hopes to pursue a career in international public health, focusing on research.

Dilorom Kosimova is completing her master’s degree in the International Health Policy and Management program at Brandeis University. Her internship was with the MDR-TB project in Tomsk, Russia. Her main task for the project was maintaining a database for newly developed MDR-TB drugs, as well as researching new donor opportunities. Dilorom has a clinical background in infectious diseases and gynecology, and a project management background in maternity and child health projects in Tajikistan. She hopes to use her PIH experience in health justice to promote public health policy reforms in Central Asia.

Ilana Nelson-Greenberg will be a senior at Brown University, concentrating in development studies and informally focusing on global health. This summer, she worked with the Prevention and Access to Care and Treatment (PACT) project to help them expand their HIV/AIDS community health worker model to serve diabetes patients. Working alongside community health workers at PACT and physicians at a local community health center, Ilana helped to refine the instruments used in the intervention, edit the diabetes curriculum, and create a workbook for patients. She also helped develop and test the qualitative interview, aimed to solicit patients’ explanatory models of illness. She hopes to travel after graduating before continuing on to graduate school.

Manisha Patel graduated in 2009 from Indiana University, where she majored in biology and international studies with a concentration in human rights and social movements. She used her study abroad experience in Cape Town, South Africa, to write her senior thesis on the ways that ideology influences policy in relation to HIV/AIDS in South Africa. She’s currently working with Dr. Gene Bukhman on neglected chronic disease in Rwanda and evaluating how to work with ministries of health to strengthen health systems. She is also creating a database to help study the state of cardiac care in Africa. Through her internship, Manisha has been able to meet leaders in the field of medicine and social justice and begin working toward her goal of learning how to create and implement models for sustainable health systems in resource-poor settings. 

Madden Rowell is majoring in human biology at Scripps College. As an intern with the Development department, Madden worked on an outreach program with colleges and universities using Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains as part of their freshman year orientation programs in an effort to foster Communities of Concern on college campuses. Madden compiled a teaching guide for high school teachers interested in using Kidder’s book in their classrooms. She also analyzed the development data from Village Health Works, a non-profit in Burundi with close ties to PIH, to help them identify giving trends. In the fall, Madden will spend a semester in Switzerland studying international health and development. She hopes to stay active in the PIH community by remaining involved with FACE AIDS, a student movement to mobilize and inspire students to fight AIDS in Africa.

Maggie Sullivan is a family nurse practitioner with an interest in serving immigrant patients and their families. She studied at the University of California-San Francisco and went on to provide primary care services for several years at a federally qualified health center in the Bay Area. Her internship focused on gathering clinical and educational resources for nurses in Haiti, identifying funding opportunities for PIH’s nursing initiatives, and laying the groundwork for a new listserv for nurses interested in global health.