Class of 2018 Global Health Elective Students

The following students partipated in global health electives through the Center for Global Health during the summer of 2015 under the guidance of faculty members in Haiti, Tanzania, and India. 

Eric Kutscher
Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Organization: GHESKIO
During his eight week experience with GHESKIO, Eric worked on a few different projects under the guidance of Dr. Dan Fitzgerald and Dr. Molly McNairy. One project was a study on health outcomes among HIV positive patients who have been on antiretroviral medications for 10 years. Eric's responsibilities for the project included organizing lab results for patients, collecting and entering information into databases. He also worked on another project on tracking Tuberculosis attrition data among teenagers, in which he focused on transcribing data from old registries into an Excel document, and will work on the study's data analysis going forward. 

Katherine Li
Pune, India
Organization: BJ Medical College
Katherine spent eight weeks at the BJ Medical College in Pune, India working on a pilot study under the mentorship of Dr. Jyoti Mathad. The study investigated the characterization of suppressed immunity in pregancy and the associated risk for developing active TB infection. Her role was to coordinate patient enrollment, sample collection, and sample analysis. Additionally she was involved in an effort to transfer patient data from paper copies to a web-enabled tablet interface. Katherine also learned about many other trials taking place at BJMC, and attend clinical rounds at various hospitals throughout Pune. 

Paul McClelland
Mwanza, Tanzania
Organization: Weill Bugando Medical Center
During his two months at the Bugando Medical Center, Paul participated in rotations across five departments. Under the mentorship of Dr. Roger Hartl and Dr. Luke Smart, Paul helped conduct a research project that assessed the epidemiology and management of traumatic brain injury (TBI). The objective was to describe te epidemiology and treatments available and determine predictors of mortality and identify areas for future improvement. Paul helped collect, digitize, and analyze data from a two-year prospective study of TBI-related admissions and outcomes, as well as write a draft of a paper designed to consolidate the data and present it for publication. 

Emily Nash
Mwanza, Tanzania
Organization: Weill Bugando Medical Center
Emily spent eight weeks in Mwanza, Tanzania at Bugando Medical Center. Along with clinical observation, her experience was focused on a research project in the outpatient HIV clinic under the guidance of Dr. Robert Peck. The primary objective of her project was to compare ten-year and lifetime cardiovascular risk scores between three study groups: HIV-infected adults not yet on ART, HIV-infected adults on ART, and HIV-negative controls. Emily's main responsibilities included analyzing the data and writing a manuscript. The study concluded that the lifetime cardiovascular risk was significantly higher among HIV-infected adults on ART compared to HIV-negative controls. 

Cecilia Nicol
Mwanza, Tanzania
Organization: Weill Bugando Medical Center
Cecilia spent eight weeks at the Weill Bugando Medical Center under the guidance of Dr. Robert Peck and Dr. Luke Smart. She focused on a project within the Opthalmology department, creating a tele-medicine system to detect opthalmic disease in paients with chronic illness and to train medical personnel in the use of the system. She used a nonmydriatic camera to take photographs of inpatients and outpatients visiting the chronic disease clinics and developed a web-based system using Amazon Cloud and Google forms through which photographs were uploaded in Mwanza and then viewed and interpreted in New York.