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People

Awash Teklehaimanot

Director of Malaria and NTD Program, Senior Research Scientist, The Earth Institute; Professor of Clinical Epidemiology; Director, Center for National Health Development in Ethiopia (CNHDE), Columbia University

Teklehaimanot, a native of Ethiopia, splits his time between Addis Ababa and New York as the director of CNHDE. He is a professor of clinical epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health, director of the Malaria Program at Columbia University, and oversees malaria prevention and treatment in the Millennium Villages. Teklehaimanot received his first degree from Addis Ababa University and subsequent graduate and postgraduate degrees from a number of American universities, which include a master’s in environmental health, a Ph.D. in medical entomology and parasitology, and a master’s in public health from Harvard University; he also did postdoctoral work at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. Teklehaimanot has extensive international experience in public health with a particular focus on Africa. He has worked for the World Health Organization in senior positions in Geneva for the last 14 years. Dr. Teklehaimanot was a board member of Roll Back Malaria from 2008 to 2010, representing research and academia. He was also extensively involved during the last three years in the UN Millennium project serving as one of the coordinators for Task Force Five, which dealt with HIV/AIDS, Malaria, TB and access to medicines.

Jeffrey Sachs

Director of The Earth Institute; Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development; Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University; Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon; President and Co-Founder of Millennium Promise Alliance

From 2002 to 2006, Sachs was Director of the UN Millennium Project and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals, the internationally agreed goals to reduce extreme poverty, disease, and hunger by the year 2015. Sachs is also President and Co-Founder of Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization aimed at ending extreme global poverty.

 He is widely considered to be the leading international economic advisor of his generation. For more than 20 years Sachs has been in the forefront of the challenges of economic development, poverty alleviation, and enlightened globalization, promoting policies to help all parts of the world to benefit from expanding economic opportunities and wellbeing. He is also one of the leading voices for combining economic development with environmental sustainability, and as Director of the Earth Institute leads large-scale efforts to promote the mitigation of human-induced climate change.

 In 2004 and 2005 he was named among the 100 most influential leaders in the world by Time Magazine. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan, a high civilian honor bestowed by the Indian Government, in 2007. Sachs lectures constantly around the world and was the 2007 BBC Reith Lecturer. He is author of hundreds of scholarly articles and many books, including the New York Times bestsellers Common Wealth (Penguin, 2008) and The End of Poverty (Penguin, 2005). Sachs is a member of the Institute of Medicine and is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Prior to joining Columbia, he spent over twenty years at Harvard University, most recently as Director of the Center for International Development. A native of Detroit, Michigan, Sachs received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard University.

Yanis Ben Amor

Director of the Tropical Laboratory Initiative; HIV/AIDS and TB Technical Advisor for the Millennium Villages Project, Earth Institute, Columbia University

Ben Amor is an associate research scientist at the Earth Institute and the HIV/AIDS Technical Advisor for the Millennium Villages project. He is currently investigating the critical role of new diagnostics in the control of tuberculosis in developing countries. Ben Amor is also responsible for the successful implementation of laboratories within the Millennium Villages (either at the health facility level or the district hospital level). His tuberculosis-related research is focused on finding ways to improve the diagnosis of TB in developing countries. Ben Amor analyzes new, rapid diagnostic tools being investigated and develops ways to allow their implementation in resource-poor settings, where electricity and clean water can be limiting factors. As part of his work with the Millennium Villages project, Ben Amor is also developing a point-of-care diagnostic toolkit for community health workers (CHWs) based on existing tests to diagnose diseases such as malaria, syphilis and HIV infection. This toolkit will be appropriate for each site of the project based on the level of education and intervention of CHWs as well as the immediate needs in terms of infectious disease control and nutrition.

Jackline Oluoch Aridi

Regional Community Health Advisor at MDG Center, East & Southern Africa , Earth Institute, Columbia University

Aridi coordinates the implementation of Community Health Worker (CHW) Program Initiatives in 8 sites located in 6 countries across East and Southern Africa. She provides technical assistance to the Millenium Villages Project site teams in interventions involved at the community level. Prior to her work with the MDG Center East & Southern Africa, she worked with the International Center for AIDS Care and Treatment Programs at Columbia University. She received a Masters in Public Administration, International Health Policy and Management from New York University and a Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry at Egerton University.   

Matt Berg

ICT Director for Millennium Villages Project; Earth Institute Researcher, Columbia University

Matt Berg, ICT director for the Millennium Villages Project and Earth Institute researcher, was named to the 2010 TIME 100, the magazine's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Berg has been instrumental in bringing mobile phone based services, computer access and connectivity to some of the most remote and poorest regions of Africa. His work has significantly impacted many lives in the fields of education, health, infrastructure and business. Specific projects Berg has helped to lead, with his colleagues at MVP, include ChildCount+, a mobile health platform to promote maternal and child health, and the Rural Technology Lab in Mali which is part of a greater effort to build local computer programming capacity in Africa.  

Yirgalem Mekonnen Bogale

Malaria Officer, CNHDE, Columbia University

Mekonnen, MD, MPH, has been working as Clinician and Mentor in public and private health facilities, and recently he has been working as Project Coordinator in various health projects in Ethiopia. At CNHDE, he is supporting the MVP in the areas of malaria parasitology and case management. Moreover, he is also involved in providing support for NTDs. Trained as a medical doctor in the University of Gondar, Ethiopia, Mekonnen has worked with the Ethiopian Medical Association, with Family Health International and with USAID in infectious disease control, particularly in scaling up access to treatment and building capacity within local health systems.

David Fidock 

Associate Professor of Medicine and Microbiology & Immunology, Columbia University

Dolo Guimogo

 Malaria Officer, CNHDE, Columbia University

Guimogo received his Ph.D. in medical entomology and parasitology in Mali, where he has conducted extensive research in malaria at the Malaria Research and Training Center and taught at the University of Bamako. An expert in the malaria vectors of West Africa, he currently advises several countries in the implementation of indoor residual spraying for vector control and monitors insecticide resistance. At the Malaria Research and Training Center he headed the molecular entomology and insecticide resistance units. Guimogo is also responsible for providing technical support on malaria prevention and treatment to the Millennium Villages of West and Central Africa, from his base at the MDG Center in Bamako. He has a strong background in applied population genetics of the Anopheles gambiae malaria vector, applied ecology, vector behavior, vector physiology, integrated pest and vector management (IPVM), and vector control programs. He has collaborated with the Malian National Malaria Control Program (NMCP).

Anbessaw Belay Haile

NTD Officer, CNHDE, Columbia University

Environmental health specialist with expertise in water, sanitation and hygiene, Haile has over 13 years of field work experience, designing, constructing and rehabilitating small-scale water supply schemes and sanitation and hygiene infrastructure in rural communities and emergency settings, such as refugee camps. He has also implemented disease control projects working with local, regional and national health offices, as well as with all the major development partners of Ethiopia: PEPFAR, BPRM, USAID, European Union (ECO), UNICEF, UNFPA, UNDP and WHO.  To these projects he brings his experience in mobilizing community support for health promotion and disease prevention.

Ameha Hadgu

Statistician, CNHDE, Columbia University

Hadgu joined the Center for National Health Development in Ethiopia (CNHDE) in November 2007. He received his masters and bachelors degree in statistics from Addis Ababa University in 2004 and 1997 respectively. He has more than 10 years of experience as a statistician and as a monitoring and evaluation and planning and programming officer in governmental and non-governmental organizations in Ethiopia. He has worked in areas of economic development, education, food security and health. His past employment experiences include survey and research study design, data collection, editing and analysis in socio-economic, food security, nutrition and health areas, as well as developing and maintaining databases. In CNHDE,  he has been involved in the data collection, editing and analysis of the health extension program (HEP) follow-up survey in 2007 and bednet utilization survey in 2009 in four major regions (Amhara, Oromia, SNNP, and Tigray) and in the country-wide health extension program evaluation survey which was conducted in 2010.

Geoffrey Johnston

PhD candidate in Sustainable Development, Columbia University

Johnston is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Ph.D. program in Sustainable Development. His goal is to explore and develop methodologies for helping peoples lift themselves out of poverty, especially in developing countries. He is interested in building spatiotemporal mathematical models of malaria transmission that can be utilized to develop optimal sets of interventions. He is also interested in market failures and agent modeling in economics.

 After graduating from the University of Notre Dame with a BS in pure mathematics and a BA in philosophy, summa cum laude, Johnston was a corps member in Teach for America, teaching high school in Mississippi for two years and grade school in Cleveland for an additional year. He was a 2001 U.S. Presidential Scholar, has coauthored a paper on modeling magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters for NASA, worked at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and studied law, physics, and math for a year at New College, Oxford. He is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow as well as an IGERT International Development and Globalization Fellow.

Andrew Kanter

Director of Health Information Systems/Medical Informatics, Millennium Villages Project; Assistant Professor of Clinical Biomedical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology, Columbia University

Gordon McCord

McCord is Associate Director of the Earth Institute’s Center on Globalization and Sustainable Development and an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Diego’s School of International Relations and Pacific Studies.   He recently graduated from Columbia’s PhD program in Sustainable Development at the School of International and Public Affairs. McCord’s interests include economic growth and poverty reduction, the role of geography in economic dynamics, and the interaction of epidemiology and poverty (particularly in the case of malaria). Prior to his doctoral work, McCord worked as Special Assistant to Jeffrey Sachs at the Earth Institute and at the UN Millennium Project.

Paola Mejia

Associate Research Scholar; Malaria and NTD Coordinator, Earth Institute, Columbia University

Mejia is an Associate Research Scholar with the Malaria and Neglected Tropical Diseases program of the Earth Institute, which is responsible for the malaria-related work of CGHED and for providing technical assistance to national malaria control programs in more than ten African countries. Mejia supports the malaria control activities in the Millennium Villages, working with a team of colleagues based in the Center for National Health Development in Ethiopia (CNHDE) in Addis Ababa and in Bamako. She received an MPH and a Ph.D. in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, where she researched the history of malaria control in Latin America. She is interested in the intersection of history and policy in public health. Before coming to Columbia, she practiced medicine in her native Colombia –where she obtained her Medical Degree at the National University, working with the Wayuu indigenous group in the north of the country. She also lectured in the History of Medicine in the Colombian School of Medicine in Bogota and conducted research using social sciences to understand public health problems, such as the social and cultural determinants of cervical cancer in Colombia, and the impact of acculturation in the nutritional status of children of indigenous groups.

Joanna Rubinstein

Director, Center for Global Health and Economic Development (CGHED); Chief of Staff to Jeffrey D. Sachs

As Jeffrey D. Sachs’ Chief of Staff, Rubinstein coordinates the activities of the Earth Institute Director’s Office and supports the Director in establishing new strategic partnership initiatives and international projects. Rubinstein is also the director of the Center for Global Health and Economic Development at the Earth Institute (CGHED). Rubinstein is trained as a DDS and a scientist with a Ph.D. in cell and molecular biology. She uses her 15 years of experience as a practicing scientist and senior administrator in Europe to coordinate complex projects across the Earth Institute. On the international front, she was responsible for the science and health initiatives of the UN Millennium Project and helped to develop collaborations with foreign academic institutions, research-funding organizations and the private sector. Rubinstein leads several strategic initiatives within the University and with external partners, including the Malaria Quick Impact Initiative, scaling up of Neglected Tropical Disease Control, Digital Health, Early Childhood Development, the Drylands Initiative, and national advisory programs to scale up health systems to attain the Millennium Development Goals. Before coming to the Earth Institute in 2005, Rubinstein was the Senior Associate Dean for Institutional and Global Initiatives at the Columbia University Medical Center. Prior to that, Rubinstein was at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, where she was director for research and postgraduate education from 1999 to 2002. She also served as Sweden's representative to a European Commission committee and was a director at Sweden's Medical Research Council.

Sonia Ehrlich Sachs

Director of Health, Millennium Villages Project, Earth Institute, Columbia University

Ehrlich Sachs is a pediatrician and public health specialist. She received a BA from Harvard University, an MD from the University of Maryland Medical School, and an MPH from Harvard School of Public Health. A pediatrician with a specialty in pediatric endocrinology, Ehrlich Sachs practiced medicine for over 20 years, 14 of which she spent at the Harvard University Health Services. In 2004 she joined the Earth Institute and became the health coordinator for the Millennium Villages Project overseeing all health related interventions and research. The Millennium Villages Project is proof of concept that extremely poor, rural communities can reach the Millennium Development Goals given a science-based, community led approach of integrated interventions that increase food production and increase access to health care, education, water and infrastructure. The goal is to show that such an integrated development approach is both scalable and sustainable.

Djibril Sangare

Malaria Officer, CNHDE, Columbia University

Sangare holds PhDs in Molecular Entomology/Parasitology and in Molecular Entomology. As an entomologist and parasitologist, Sangare has expertise in applied genetic ecology of Anopheles gambiae s.l, applied population genetics of malaria vectors and parasites, and performing malaria epidemiology assessments in rural and urban areas. He has collaborated with the Malian National Malaria Control Program (NMCP).  Sangare is also responsible for providing technical support on malaria prevention and treatment to the Millennium Villages of West and Central Africa, from his base at the MDG Center in Bamako.

Prabhjot Singh

Director, Program for Health Systems; Community Health Worker Advisor; Assistant Professor, School of International and Public Affairs

Singh is Director of the Program for Health Systems and Community Health Worker Advisor to the Millennium Villages. He is also an Assistant Professor at the School of International Public Affairs. His work focuses on strengthening implementation systems and technical decision making capacity at community, district/municipal and national levels in low-resource settings.  As a clinical practitioner, he highlights challenges usually attributed to the health system (i.e. child/maternal mortality, malnutrition and disease surveillance/management) that require multi-sector coordination and community-based responses. His work blends operational research, analytical tool/technology development, with policy analysis to support sustainable development planning for practitioners, entrepreneurs and bureaucrats. Singh received a BS in Developmental Biology and BA in History from the University of Rochester, a Ph.D. in Neural and Genetic Systems from Rockefeller University, Post-Doctoral fellow in Health and Economic Development at Columbia University, an MD from Weill Cornell Medical College with further clinical training in internal medicine.

Hailay Teklehaimanot

Madeleine Thomson

Senior Research Scientist, Climate Information for Public Health, Earth Institute, Columbia University

Thomson is a Senior Research Scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) with over eight years of service in the management team as Director of Impacts Research, Chair of the Africa Regional Programme and Senior advisor to the PAHO-WHO Collaborating Centre for malaria and other climate sensitive diseases. She currently leads the Health portfolio at IRI. She trained originally as a field entomologist and has spent much of her career engaged in operational research in support of large-scale health interventions, mostly in Africa. Her research focuses on the development of new tools for improving climate sensitive health interventions (e.g. riskmapping and early warning systems for malaria, onchocerciasis, kala azar, etc). This work has expanded into air-borne infections and she is currently developing a substantive programme for meningitis environmental risk assessment in anticipation of the new conjugate A vaccine. In recent years she has become increasingly interested in improving institutional and human capacity for incorporating climate information into health planning. To help achieve the latter she is working to create a 'health and climate' disciplinary interface and a 'climate smart' public health community.

She has been PI and Co-PI on projects funded by the UK Department for International Development, The UK Meningitis Research Foundation, NASA, the Environmental Health Project of USAID, The UK Medical Research Council, The World Health Organisation, The African Programme for Onchocerciasis Control, the European Union and Google.org. She joined the IRI in May 2002.

 

Community Health Worker (CHW) Managers in each Millennium Village