Tutors
Introduction to Social Medicine Tutors — Brief Bios
The following listing excludes tutors who are members of the DGHSM core faculty, since information about them may be found under the faculty pages of this site. It includes course faculty members who are currently teaching or have taught in the past two years. It includes full time, part time, and substitute tutors.
César E. Abadía-Barrero, DMD, DMSc, is Associate Professor of Medical Anthropology at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá and Visiting Associate Professor at the DGHSM. He has studied the social responses to the AIDS epidemic in Brazil and the deleterious impact of the privatization of the Colombian health care system on health care providers, health care delivery and patient’s outcomes. His main interest is incorporating different critical and activist-oriented perspectives to the study and transformation of health inequalities. Dr. Abadía is part of an NGO and of a national campaign that defends health as a fundamental human right in Colombia. He is the author of I Have AIDS but I am Happy. Children’s Subjectivities, AIDS and Social Responses in Brazil (2011), and lead editor of Health, Normalization and Capitalism in Colombia (forthcoming, In Spanish).
Mary Catherine Arbour, MD, is Associate Physician for Research at the Division of Global Health Equity of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Senior Research Associate at the Harvard Center on the Developing Child. She performs global health research aimed at designing and evaluating interdisciplinary, community-based interventions in resource-poor settings with the goal of reducing inequities around the world. She directs the health component of Un Buen Comienzo, a cluster-randomized controlled trial of a preschool health and education intervention in Santiago, Chile. Early formative work as an anthropologist and community organizer informed her prior work, which includes qualitative and quantitative research on HIV and primary care delivery in Burkina Faso, South Africa, Indonesia and Peru, as well as clinical care in Rwanda, Peru, Haiti, Guatemala, Honduras and with underserved populations within the United States. She holds a BA in biological anthropology from Swarthmore College, an MD from Harvard Medical School and an MPH from Harvard School of Public Health.
Jaya Aysola, MD, MPH, is at the Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School and the Department of General Medicine and Primary Care, Brigham Women’s Hospital, where she is a research fellow and associate physician interested in health care disparities in the context of primary care delivery. She recently received her MPH through the Commonwealth Fund-Harvard University Minority Health Policy Fellowship. Prior to that, she was the Medical Director of the New Orleans Children's Health Project and Assistant Professor in Pediatrics and Internal Medicine at Tulane University School of Medicine. In addition, she was the Section Chief of Community Pediatrics and Global Health. Her move to New Orleans came in response to Hurricane Katrina. Since 2006 she has transitioned the program from urgent care to primary care pediatrics and comprehensive mental health care. Responding to the growing Hispanic migrant population, in 2008, she created the Hispanic Outreach Initiative to expand her clinic to include comprehensive primary care and behavioral services in Spanish coupled with Hispanic community partnerships and advocacy. Under her leadership, the program expanded to include a health education and disease prevention program designed to promote wellness in the community. In January 2009, she created the Section of Community Pediatrics and Global Health, dedicated to resident training in tackling the challenges of health care disparities domestically and abroad. Prior to her work in New Orleans, she received her Diploma of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene from the London School, and her work experiences took her to Puttaparthi and Calcutta, India, Lamnarai, Thailand, and Siem Riep, Cambodia. She holds a BS in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, an MD from University of Pittsburgh, School of Medicine, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics.
Clement Bottino, MD, is from New York and completed his medical school and residency training at Columbia. He then moved to Boston for a fellowship in general academic pediatrics at Children's Hospital which he finished in July 2012, along with an MPH from Harvard School of Public Health. Clem stayed on as a pediatrician at the Children's Hospital Primary Care Center where he specializes in childhood obesity prevention and management. His research and clinical interests include contextual determinants of health and primary prevention through healthy living. Clem enjoys riding his bicycle to the hospital and practicing yoga.
Ted Cohen, MD, MPH, DrPH, is Associate Scientist in the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Assistant Professor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health. He is an epidemiologist whose research focuses on the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases of global public health importance. His current work focuses on TB and HIV, with research sites located in Botswana, Kenya, Peru, and South Africa. He uses a combination of mathematical modeling techniques and traditional methods for epidemiological analysis in his research. He attended medical school at Duke University and received training in public health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before obtaining his doctoral degree in epidemiology with a concentration in infectious diseases at the Harvard School of Public Health in 2006. Dr. Cohen is also a Faculty Member in the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics (CCDD) at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH).
Paul Cruickshank is a PhD candidate in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. He is currently writing a dissertation on the political and institutional changes in international health in the 1970s. In addition to the history of global health, his research interests focus on science policy in international development, and the history of science, technology and medicine in contemporary China.
Jan-Walter De Neve, MD, is a Takemi Fellow in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard School of Public Health. His current research looks into the causal effect of education on HIV risk in sub-Saharan Africa, for which he uses education policy reforms as natural experiments. Walter has worked clinically in Belgium, Haiti, India, Israel, South Africa and Switzerland. In 2005, he co-founded an international NGO that aims to promote health conditions globally, and for which he was recently the recipient of the annual University of Brussels Alumni Award. He holds an M.D. degree from the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium and was previously a post-doctoral research fellow in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Deborah Doroshow is a fourth year student at Harvard Medical School. She recently defended her Ph.D. dissertation, "Emotionally Disturbed: Residential Treatment, Child Psychiatry, and the Creation of Normal Childhood in Mid-Twentieth Century America," in the Department of History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. Her research interests include 20th century American medicine, history of therapeutics and therapeutic efficacy, history of childhood and child health, and history of psychiatry. She has published on the history of residential treatment in child psychiatry, the origins of the bedwetting alarm, and the use of insulin in American psychiatry.
Andrew Ellner, MD, is Associate Physician at the Division of Global Health Equity, Brigham and Women's Hospital, an Instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and on the faculty of the Global Health Delivery project. His work focuses on improving health systems for underserved populations. For the last year he directed the academic consortium of the WHO Maximizing Positive Synergies Initiative. Previously, he was the Clinical Policy Director of the Clinton Foundation's Rural Initiative. He practices primary care in the Brigham Internal Medicine Associates. His previous research focused on essential drug policy and health care access in the United States. He is a graduate of Harvard Medical School and completed a residency in Internal Medicine at the Brigham and Women's Hospital. He earned an MSc from the London School of Economics and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in Health Policy, Planning, and Financing.
Eric Fleegler, MD, MPH, is an Assistant in Medicine in the Division of Pediatric Emergency Medicine at Children’s Hospital Boston and an Instructor in Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. His work centers on understanding and improving health disparities and social determinants of health that affect all populations. His two primary projects involve the development of Web-based technologies that (1) improve families’ access to social services and (2) enhance systems of communication for chronic disease management. His primary project, “The Online Advocate”, has evolved into a multifaceted tool used for research and service provision, utilized by multiple medical systems, the Boston Mayor’s Office, and the Boston Public Health Commission. Dr. Fleegler received his MD from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and his MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health.
Marshall Fleurant, MD, is a second year General Internal Medicine Research Fellow at the Department of Population Medicine a joint department of Harvard Pilgrim Health Institute and Harvard Medical School. He received his medical degree from Albert Einstein Medical School in Bronx, NY, and completed internal medicine residency at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. His current research interest includes health information technology and its effect on primary care and health disparities. He is currently practicing at Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates in Urgent Care and completing his Masters in Public Health at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Joseph Frank, MD, is a fellow in General Internal Medicine and Primary Care at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital. He received his medical degree from Indiana University School of Medicine and completed a residency and chief residency in Internal Medicine and Primary Care at the Alpert Medical School at Brown University. He is interested in the intersection of the correctional and healthcare systems and better understanding disparities in health outcomes and access among individuals involved in the criminal justice system. Additionally, he is interested in the management of addiction and chronic pain in primary care settings.
Becky Genberg, PhD, MPH, is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Health Services, Policy and Practice in the Public Health Program at the Alpert School of Medicine at Brown University. She is an epidemiologist specializing in longitudinal methodologies to understand the social and economic determinants of HIV prevention and treatment outcomes in resource-poor settings. She has experience working on public health and research projects in the U.S., Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Thailand, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. She obtained a master’s degree in public health in 2002 before completing a doctoral degree in epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in 2010. Her dissertation explored trajectories of injection drug use and the impact of the neighborhood social and economic environment on long-term cessation of injection drug use in Baltimore City.
Jeremy Greene, MD, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Science of Harvard University, Instructor in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics of Harvard Medical School, and Associate Physician in the Department of Medicine of Brigham & Women’s Hospital. His research interests focus on the history of the pharmaceutical industry and its interactions with medical research, clinical practice, and public health, and his first book, Prescribing By Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease (published January 2007 by Johns Hopkins University Press) traces the development of chronic disease categories as markets for risk-reducing pharmaceuticals. Currently he is working on a history of generic medicines, therapeutic exchange, and essential medications; his other work has focused on medication nonadherence, access to pharmaceuticals, and the historical development and impact of pharmaceutical marketing, advertising, and salesmanship. Dr. Greene received his MD and his PhD from Harvard in 2005 and is affiliated with Castle Society.
Caterina Hill, MSc, specializes in enabling non-profit organizations to demonstrate their impact through quantitative and qualitative research. Since joining Harvard Medical School's Department of Global Health and Social Medicine as Research Associate, she has focused on building a body of evidence around the impact of mobile clinics for prevention in under-served areas in the U.S. She is co-Investigator of Mobile Health Map, a national research network, and Research and Evaluation Manager of the Family Van mobile clinic, a program of HMS. She has a Masters from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and an undergraduate degree in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge, UK.
Jennifer Kasper, MD, MPH, is in the Division of Global Health at Massachusetts General Hospital for Children; Instructor at Harvard Medical School; Pediatrician at Chelsea Health Care Center; Co-Chair of the HMS Faculty Committee on Global and Community Health and Primary Care and Vice-President and Chair of the International Volunteer Committee of Doctors for Global Health (DGH). DGH works in partnership with rural under-served communities in Central and South America, Mexico, and Africa, promoting health and other human rights. Her academic pursuits include health service delivery, holistic community development and community health worker training in resource limited settings; and educational strategies for medical students and trainees interested in working in resource limited settings. She has worked in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Mexico, Haiti, India, Mozambique, and Uganda. She has published works on the human rights of children; immigrants and hunger; child labor; orphans and vulnerable children in the context of HIV; global health career development; the role of academic institutions in addressing human resource constraints in resource-limited settings. She received a combined BA/MD with honors from Boston University and Boston University School of Medicine and an MPH from Boston University School of Public Health.
Ravi Kavasery, MD, is a senior resident in Internal Medicine and Primary Care at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. His interests include serving as a primary care provider for the medically under-served and the creation of health systems that address underlying social determinants of health. His research experience includes studying the expansion of HIV testing in US jails, community re-entry challenges for prisoners in Malaysia, and access to treatment among injection drug users in Baltimore. He is currently helping develop an educational curriculum to provide young men from Boston’s neighborhoods with health advocacy training emphasizing social determinants of health. Ravi is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and Yale School of Medicine. Prior to medical school, he was awarded a Luce Scholarship to work for the Ministry of Environment in South Korea.
Vanessa Kerry, MD, MSc, is Director of Global Health Policy and Social Change and a lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Her academic focus is on developing needed partnerships between medicine, and public and foreign policy. She is working to help highlight the impacts of political decisions on health, the need to support health education and capacity building programs in developing countries, and the role health can play in improving foreign assistance efforts. Her work has included efforts to have U.S. federal funding for training and careers in global health, as well as looking at models for U.S. foreign assistance to fund health efforts which improve efficiency of aid delivery, develop capacity, and enhance national sovereignty. She is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Medical School, completing her residency in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. She earned her master’s from the London School of Economics and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in Health Policy, Planning, and Financing. She is also the Associate Director of Education and External Affairs at the Center for Global Health at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Roderick K. King, MD, MPH, is Instructor in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and Senior Faculty at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Disparities Solutions Center. He was an Inaugural Anniversary Fellow in the Institute of Medicine (IOM), National Academy of Sciences where he served on the Board on Global Health and on the study committee, “The US Commitment to Global Health.” Dr. King's research interests are health systems strengthening, specifically leadership/workforce development, workforce diversity, health disparities, and the impact of social determinants of health. Prior to returning to Harvard Medical School, he most recently served as Director for the Health Resources and Services Administration, New England Region One and as a Commander in the U.S. Public Health Service, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. King earned his B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University, his MD from Cornell University Medical College, and his MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health as a Commonwealth Fund-Harvard University Fellow in Minority Health Policy.
Eric L. Krakauer, MD, PhD, is Director of International Programs at the Harvard Medical School Center for Palliative Care, Attending Physician on the General Medical Unit and Palliative Care Service and Co-Chair of the ethics committee at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Instructor in Medicine and in Global Health & Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Krakauer presently is assisting Vietnam’s Ministry of Health to integrate palliative care in its national healthcare system. His current research focuses on clinical and policy aspects of palliative care for poor and medically underserved populations, clinical and ethical issues in end-of-life care, and clinical education in Vietnam.
Aditi Nerurkar, MD, MPH, is a fellow in Integrative Medicine at Harvard Medical School's Osher Research Center. Her current research interest is in mind-body therapies and their application to chronic diseases of lifestyle. She completed her residency in Internal Medicine from University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in 2008, and spent time in Ghana as a primary care physician. Prior to clinical medicine, she received her MPH from Columbia University. She was a consultant in Geneva at a WHO collaborating center on HIV and migration. She worked on a USAID project with various African ministries of health on HIV's impact on military, refugees, and internally displaced people in Sub-Saharan Africa. She practices Integrative Medicine at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine at MGH.
Daniel Palazuelos, MD, MPH, is an Associate Physician at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an Instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He graduated from Brown Medical School and completed a residency in Internal Medicine and Global Health Equity at BWH. He is the Clinical Director of the Partners In Health-supported project in Chiapas, Mexico. In this role, he lives for half of the year in isolated communities in the Sierra Madre Mountains, training local Community Health Promoters, providing medical care, conducting research, hosting medical student projects, and creating original curricula. For the other half of the year, he lives in Boston and practices inpatient medicine with the Hospitalist Group at BWH.
Giuseppe Raviola, MD, a board-certified adult and child/adolescent psychiatrist, is an instructor in psychiatry and in global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School and the medical director of the Psychiatry Quality Program in the Department of Psychiatry at Children’s Hospital Boston (CHB). In his role at CHB he provides oversight of the Department’s patient safety, quality, and outcomes initiatives, and works with various departmental services to assess and improve the quality of patient care provided. This work provides grounding for his roles in global health as the director of the Program in Global Mental Health and Social Change (PGMHSC) in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at HMS, and as the director of Mental Health for Partners In Health (PIH). In the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine Dr. Raviola works to advance efforts related both to training and education, and research, promoting excellence in global mental health care delivery in the countries with which the program partners and at Harvard Medical School. In his role with PIH he works to integrate mental health services into the care provided at PIH sites, supporting local team leaders in Haiti, Rwanda, and elsewhere on issues related to mental health care delivery. To that end, he oversees clinical, training, and research efforts relating to mental health in collaboration with in-country colleagues. Dr. Raviola is also co-director of medical student education in psychiatry at CHB, and he maintains a clinical practice in the community for children, adults, and families.
Joe Rhatigan, MD, is director of the Global Health Equity Residency Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and works clinically as a hospitalist there. He graduated from HMS in 1992 and finished his residency in internal medicine at the BWH in 1995. As one of the key faculty members of the Global Health Delivery Project at Harvard, he develops case studies analyzing the design implementation of health care service delivery in resource constrained settings.
Samantha Rosman, MD, is an is an Assistant in Medicine in the Division of Pediatric Emergency Medicine at Children’s Hospital Boston and an Instructor in Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. She has devoted her career to advocacy for improved access to care and her work centers on how issues of access to care effect patient’s health status and how health policy decisions surrounding access impact the health of our population. Dr. Rosman served four years on the American Medical Association Board of Trustees in which capacity she served as chair of the AMA Board Task Force on Health System Reform and as a key spokesperson for the AMA's Voice for the Uninsured Campaign traveling the country speaking with physicians, the public, and the media about the critical need for health system reform. While still in medical school she co-founded a student-organized free primary care health center to serve a large uninsured population in New York. Dr. Rosman received her MD from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and completed her residency in Pediatrics at the Boston Combined Residency Program and her fellowship in Pediatric Emergency Medicine at Boston Medical Center.
Christiana Russ, MD, DTMH, is the Assistant Medical Director of the Intermediate Care Program at Children’s Hospital Boston and an Instructor in Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Her interest is in identifying strategies for improving clinical education and teaching strategies for health care workers who work, or plan to work, in resource limited settings. She has taught and provided clinical care primarily in small hospitals in western Uganda and Kenya, and has researched the efficacy of educational videos on child health topics targeted at caregivers waiting at hospitals. She is rotation director for the Boston Combined Residency Program (BCRP) Pediatric Global Health Rotations and has developed elective global health curriculum for pediatric residents. She and other global health coordinators in pediatric residencies are building a national collaborative to improve global health rotations. She received her MD at the University of Tennessee, Memphis, completed pediatric residency at the Boston Combined Residency Program, and has received a Diploma of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene from the London School. She completed the Harvard Rabkin Fellowship in Medical Education.
Aaron Shakow, PhD, completed his doctorate at Harvard in 2009 and is currently Associate Director of the Non-Communicable Disease program at Partners In Health and Lecturer in Global Health and Social Medicine at DGHSM. He has served as publications director at Partners In Health and editor of the journal Health and Human Rights. During the mid-2000s, he was Policy Officer in the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS Department. Dr. Shakow’s research interests include health financing, international governance in the health sector, and the historical impact of infectious disease control on economic relations and cultural exchange.
Oriana Walker is a PhD candidate in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. She is interested in the comparative history of healing in Europe, North America, and China, and in the anthropology of their interactions in the modern world. She is just back from 18 months of study in Taiwan and China, which included observation of the contemporary practice of “traditional” Chinese medicine in schools and clinics. Her dissertation explores the history of how we know what works: the history of perceptions of and ways of measuring efficacy in these traditions.
Rebecca Weintraub, MD, is an Associate Physician in the Division of Global Health Equity and currently the Executive Director of the Global Health Delivery (GHD) Project. The GHD Project is an interdisciplinary collaboration to systematize the study of health care delivery and to disseminate new learning to global health practitioners. Rebecca's previous work promoted access to care for HIV positive mothers and their children in Zimbabwe and India. She continues to serve as a technical advisor to Ashoka. Fifteen years ago, she launched Jumpstart, which brings college students and community volunteers together with preschool children for year long, individualized tutoring and mentoring and is now an AmeriCorps program serving over 80 communities and 15,000 preschoolers a year. Jumpstart has scaled up by an average of nearly 30 percent, making it one of America's fastest growing nonprofit organizations. Rebecca's current research interests include developing new strategies to design and scale health systems.
Michael Westerhaus, MD, MA, is a physician with the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. His interests include medical education training in social medicine, primary care delivery in domestic and international settings (Uganda), and anthropological understandings of the local and global structural factors that influence community-based healthcare delivery in Uganda. He developed and teaches a four-week immersion course for medical students in Northern Uganda that examines the social, economic, political, historical, and cultural causation of disease. He practices clinical medicine in the Jen Center for Primary Care at BWH and at Amuru Community Health Center in Northern Uganda. Also trained in medical anthropology, he is currently writing an ethnography on the emergence of community-based healthcare in Northern Uganda.
Leah Zallman, MD, is a fellow in General Medicine and Primary Care at Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance, where she practices primary care. She is currently pursuing her Master of Public Health degree at Harvard School of Public Health. Her interests include global health delivery, health disparities, and quality and access to care for under-served populations, with an interest in immigrants and refugees. She completed her residency in Internal Medicine at Boston Medical Center, where she worked with the Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights. During medical school at New York University, she worked in the rural highlands of Honduras and in Mombasa, Kenya. Her previous research centered on access to palliative care, pain management and quality of outpatient care.