2003 Kellogg Fellows in Health Policy Research
David (Hui Woong) Chae. Sc.D. is Assistant Professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Health Education at the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University. He is a social epidemiologist with a background in sociology and psychology. Broadly, his research interests are in studying determinants of minority health and identifying psychological and biological pathways that link broader social hazards and population patterns in disease distribution. More specifically, he investigates the influence of racism, structural and interpersonal forms of discrimination, and racial/ethnic identity on health. This line of research has included studies examining the effects of social stressors on mental health and health behaviors among predominantly immigrant groups, including Latino and Asian Americans. Dr. Chae received his Doctor of Science degree from the Harvard School of Public Health (Social Epidemiology), Master of Arts degree from Columbia University (Psychology), and Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Chicago (Psychology and Sociology). Prior to joining the faculty at Emory University, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco site. He was also a W.K. Kellogg Predoctoral Fellow in Health Policy and a Research Fellow at the Cambridge Center for Multicultural Mental Health Studies. His work has been published in several peer-review journals, including the American Journal of Public Health, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, Health Psychology, and Public Health Reports.Rashid Njai credits good mentorship for his own personal and academic development, and looks forward to being a good mentor for others. His undergraduate years provided opportunities to do research internships: he was a Ronald E. McNair Research Scholar and an intern with the National Association of Public Hospitals and Health Systems in Washington, D.C. He graduated from Pennsylvania State University with a B.S. in Biology and the University of Michigan with an M.P.H. in Health Behavior and Health Education, and is now in the doctoral program at the Rackham School of Public Health at University of Michigan. His research experience has covered a wide range of topics and has sought to understand the physiological impact of depression on the brain, examine John Henryism, and illuminate the effects of discrimination on health. He is interested in continuing to explore how “acculturation and ethnic identity serve as survival strategies for African-Americans in buffering psychosocial stressors in seemingly hostile environments” with the ultimate goal of becoming “a source of proactive scholarship around the intersection of ethnicity, culture, social class and health."
Sonia Ruiz spent her formative years in several developing countries, which allowed her to witness “numerous challenges to the provision of basic health care – poverty in its rawest forms, political turmoil at its peak, economic and racial segregation, and a lack of public education.” In college, she concentrated in both physiology and international studies, graduating from the University of Maryland with a B.S. in Neurophysiology and a Certificate in International Relations. Ms. Ruiz worked at a community-based organization with Latino teens and at a teen clinic, which was followed by a position at the National Council of La Raza, where she did research and outreach on health policy issues. She then began taking courses at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health while working as a policy analyst at the Kaiser Family Foundation. She participated in the drafting of the report Racial/Ethnic Differences in Cardiac Care: The Weight of the Evidence, and went on to do research and take part in the publication of reports on a wide range of topics, including Latino health, HIV/AIDS, reproductive health, and access to medical care. Ms. Ruiz aspires to be a “resource for others and further [her] goal of increasing access to quality health care for vulnerable populations.” Currently, she is doing doctoral work in health policy at Johns Hopkins University. The most likely topic of her dissertation is social inequalities and determinants of health in vulnerable populations.
Azure Thompson has a B.A. in Journalism from Howard University, where she supplemented her studies with a year of course work in Anthropology. During that period she analyzed the skeletal remains from the African Burial Ground in New York City. That experience led her to the realization that “the burden of disease among this ancient population mirrored the health disparities its descendant population suffers today.” This in turn prompted her interest in a career in health, and led her to work as a health reporter for the Washington Afro-American Newspaper. She then obtained an M.P.H. in Health Promotion and Disease Prevention from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. There, under a CDC-sponsored traineeship, she studied the relationship between substance abuse disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder and evaluated a program to improve coping skills among women in recovery from substance abuse by increasing the quality of their social relationships. She is a doctoral student in the Division of Socio-Medical Sciences at the Mailman School, and expects to do research on “the impact of racism on the social systems (e.g., families, social networks, social capital) that help mediate, mitigate, and diffuse stress,” the primary contributor to the onset of disease and illness. The most likely topic of her dissertation is “African American Health Issues, Social Inequality and Its Impact on Stress and Coping."
Giavanni Washington is taking a year off from her doctoral studies. Ms. Washington is a graduate of Florida A & M University with a B.S. in Biology and the University of Miami with an M.P.H. in Epidemiology. Her undergraduate experience and graduate experiences included doing research on topics related to molecular biology, industrial hygiene, and HIV/AIDS. Through different traineeships and international fellowships, she has participated in projects in Uganda and Angola. She is currently a consultant to a project sponsored by Charles R. Drew University that seeks to prevent HIV among military personnel in Angola. Fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, she recognizes that “questionnaires, surveys, and focus group data would all be rendered useless if language and cultural differences were not accounted for.” She looks forward to a career in the international health policy arena and in academia, where she hopes to instill her students “the desire to fortify communities by giving voice to those who cannot speak for themselves” and “given them the policy tools to motivate change."
