Student News

Food Group @ UW, a group for Nutritional Sciences students at the University, publishes an attractive, informative quarterly newsletter of tips, news, and recipes called Food for Thought. Food Group @ UW is about three years old and has more than 200 members. The group’s goal is to raise awareness of nutrition and to increase access to nutrition information for students. Take a look at the current and some past issues.

Francis Fellows
This year’s Francis Fellows—recipients of the Thomas J. Francis Jr. Global Health Fellowship for 2009–10—represent disciplines across the University. The fellowship promotes global health by providing financial assistance to students doing problem-solving practica in other cultures, usually developing countries. This is the second year of the program, which is made possible by an endowment established in memory of Dr. Thomas Francis, Jr., a noted physician, virologist and epidemiologist. Francis was instrumental in teaching Jonas Salk the methodology of vaccine development, which ultimately led to the polio vaccine.

Here’s a brief look at this year’s Fellows, several of whom are from our School, and their projects:

Ibrahim Ali

Ibrahim Ali is a concurrent degree program student who just finished his first year in the master of social work program at the UW. He entered our Global Health M.P.H. program this fall. A native of Ghana, West Africa, Ali is working with the Seattle-based Breast Health Initiative to develop education and training materials for health workers in Ghana.

Anne Buffardi

Anne Buffardi has been in the Evans School’s Public Policy and Management Ph.D. program since 2007. Anne is focusing her dissertation work on foreign assistance policy, and through her fellowship she is investigating the influence of international donor characteristics and practices on the implementation of infectious disease projects in Peru.

Jeff Chamberlain

Jeff Chamberlain is a doctoral student in Bioengineering whose thesis project involves developing a carbohydrate biosensor to study properties in milk that are implicated in reducing infection and inflammatory diseases in nursing infants. His fellowship is funding Jeff’s training at the National Institute of Medical Sciences and Nutrition in Mexico City.

Barclay-Derman

Noah Barclay-Derman is a concurrent degree student in the Global Health M.P.H. program and the Jackson School’s Master of International Studies program. As a Francis Fellow, Noah is assisting the University’s I-TECH program with curriculum development for their programs on HIV/AIDS prevention in Ethiopia.

Sarah Hohl

Sarah Hohl is working toward an M.P.H. in Global Health and, as a Francis Fellow, traveled to Timor-Leste last summer with Health Alliance International to develop a greater understanding of global health initiatives. Born in Saudi Arabia, Sarah has worked in Nairobi, Kenya, and served in the Peace Corps in Senegal, West Africa.

Jeffrey Lane

Jeffrey Lane is a joint Law and M.P.H. student who traveled last summer to Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania to examine hospital accreditation and quality improvement systems in each country. He also looked at ongoing efforts to establish a regional health facility accreditation program for all of East Africa.

Gail Potter

Gail Potter is a statistician who specializes in applications of social network analysis to international public health problems. She is currently developing statistical models to analyze the spread of influenza through networks of social contacts. Gail is pursuing a Ph.D. in statistics with a demography concentration through the Center for Statistics in the Social Sciences.

Jon Sugimoto

Jonathan Sugimoto is a doctoral student in epidemiology working at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center modeling infectious disease transmission. Jonathan’s fellowship project involves working in Niakhar, Central Senegal, on a community-randomized vaccine trial collecting novel data on respiratory contacts between individuals in a community setting.