Global Health Fellows

About the Fellowship

The Weill Cornell Center for Global Health hosts Fellows from multiple departments and divisions within Weill Cornell Medicine. Including Clinical Epidemiology, General Internal Medicine, Infectious Diseases, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, and Emergency Medicine. Global Health Research Fellowships are designed to train physicians for academic careers in global health research.

The Fellowship aims to address the global needs of resource-poor communities including primary care, non-communicable and communicable diseases, maternal and child health, health service delivery, and health equity. The three-year Fellowship in Global Health Research is tailored for post-residency graduates and includes extensive field-based research in Weill Cornell programs based in Haiti, Tanzania, Brazil, and India, along with training in research methods (MSc in Clinical Epidemiology) or other tailored research training, and teaching and clinical service at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. Graduates of US medicine programs who express a commitment to become clinician-scientists focused on global health research are eligible to apply for this Fellowship. Fellows accepted to the program will be junior faculty at Weill Cornell and will receive research funding and intensive faculty mentorship from New York and international Weill Cornell faculty.

Objectives of the Fellowship include providing trainees with the skills to design and conduct patient-oriented research and to prepare trainees for NIH K-award submission.

Dr. Molly McNairy, Dr. Daniel Fitzgerald, and Dr. Katey Walsh serve as Directors of this Fellowship program. Dr. Fitzgerald, Professor of Medicine and Director of the Center for Global Health, has over two decades of global health research experience working with GHESKIO in Haiti, where he has played a critical role in furthering advances for the treatment of HIV-AIDS and Tuberculosis. Dr. McNairy, Associate Professor of Medicine and hospitalist at NYP, conducts research on HIV and cardiovascular disease in Haiti and low-income countries. Dr. Walsh, Assistant Professor of Medicine and hospitalist at NYP, conducts research on drug resistant TB in Haiti including molecular epidemiology and treatment trials.

Current Fellows

The Center for Global Health currently hosts four Global Health Research Fellows. Dr. Godfrey Kisigo, MD, MSc is a Fellow in the Division of Clinical Epidemiology and Dr. Lily Yan, MD, MSc is a Fellow in General Internal Medicine. Dr. Anna Mertelsmann, MD and Dr. Khanh Pham, MD are each Fellows in Infectious Diseases. In addition, alumni of the GHRF program include Dr. Katey Walsh, who currently serves as a Director of the Fellowship, and Dr. Justin Roy Kingery, Associate Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell.

Dr. Kisigo received his MD from the Catholic University of Health and Allied Sciences in Tanzania and his Master of Science from Duke University. Dr. Kisigo is interested in the intersection of chronic illness and infectious diseases, including HIV and hypertension care models. His work is conducted alongside Dr. Robert Peck and Dr. Saidi Kapiga. Currently completing his Fellowship at the Mwanza Intervention Trials Unit (MITU) in Tanzania, Dr. Kisigo seeks to understand the impact of hypertension and cardiovascular disease on health outcomes in Tanzania.

Dr. Yan received her MD from Stanford University and completed a combined internal and preventive medicine residency at Boston Medical Center. Dr. Yan also holds a Master of Science from the Boston University School of Public Health. In residency, she led projects on the quality of maternal care in public facilities in Zambia, the impact of poverty on visit adherence in rural Haiti, the diabetes care continuum in Thailand, and the impact of the Affordable Care Act on the diabetes care continuum in the US. Dr. Yan is interested in non-communicable diseases in low-income countries and is currently working with our team on cardiovascular disease research in Haiti with GHESKIO.

Dr. Anna Mertelsmann received her MD from the Universität Hamburg Medizinische Fakultät in Germany. She completed her residency in internal medicine here at Weill Cornell Medicine before joining the Center for Global Health as a Fellow in Infectious Diseases. Based in Tanzania, Dr. Mertelsmann's research is focused on enhancing our understanding of the immunological response to pathogens. In particular, she is exploring how helminth infections alter anti-viral immune response.

Dr. Pham received his MD from the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts. He completed his residency in internal medicine here at Weill Cornell Medicine before joining the Center for Global Health as a Fellow in Infectious Diseases. Now in the 3rd year of his Fellowship, Dr. Pham's research is based out of Tanzania and is focused on investigating the association between Schistosoma mansoni and cardiovascular disease. In particular, he is exploring the hypothesis that helminth infections may be protective against cardiovascular disease and risk factors.

For more information email: ghrf@med.cornell.edu. 

 Global Health Research Fellowship Brochure

 Global Health Research Fellowship Flyer