David (Hui Woong)
Chae is enrolled in the doctoral program in Health and Social Behavior at the
Harvard School
of Public Health. A graduate of the University
of Chicago with a B.A. in Psychology and Teachers College, Columbia University
with an M.A. in Psychology, he is particularly interested in studying how membership
in a group or community influences the subjective experiences and realities
of individuals, so that “unequally positioned” groups, including
minority men, are at higher risk for numbers of illnesses and social maladies.
He has done research on this topic, and his advocacy work has sought to improve
the health of underserved populations, particularly Asians and Asian gay men,
Latinos and immigrants. He worked as a Project Coordinator for the Asian and
Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS (APICHA) in New York, collaborating
on a study on racial/sexual identity, experiences of discrimination, social
network characteristics, and HIV risk behavior. As a Kellogg Fellow, he expects
to “continue research on minority men’s health more broadly, and,
specifically, the mental and physical health implications of being in a marginalized
group.”
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.”
