Faculty and Staff

Ali’s research and teaching engages a range of challenges in domestic and global health ethics. This includes empirical and normative work in U.S. and international research ethics and projects that address the implications of emerging global mobile and digital technologies as applied in the context of health research, public health programs, and disease surveillance. As core faculty and associate director for global programs at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, Ali works with colleagues at JHU and other institutions internationally to advance the development of multidisciplinary research, training, and service partnerships in bioethics. He is committed to collaboratively supporting the capacity of scholars from resource-constrained countries and settings to lead bioethics research, teaching, and practice on issues of local importance. He has been involved in establishing and operating NIH Fogarty-funded non-degree, master's, doctoral, and post-doctoral programs in bioethics at Johns Hopkins and with partners in Uganda, Ethiopia, Zambia, Botswana, and Malaysia. He also co-leads the Oxford University-Johns Hopkins University Global Infectious Disease Ethics (GLIDE) Collaborative, which supports research and training between the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute and the Oxford Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities to address emerging issues involving ethics and infectious disease.

Dr. Alier holds an MPH/MBA from Johns Hopkins University as the first recipient of the center’s Peter Salama refugee scholarship program and an MD from Gulu University in Uganda. He has clinical, programmatic, and research experience in low-resourced settings, especially in emergencies.

Previously, he worked with JHPIEGO and UNICEF in quality improvement, program management, emergency preparedness, and response to crises, including conflicts, displacements, and disease outbreaks in South Sudan, Uganda, and Malawi. He supported the development of national strategies and policies and initiated and implemented large-scale reproductive maternal and newborn health programs at the facility and community levels. He is particularly interested in data and data analytics, and his research interests are in the areas of maternal and newborn health quality of care, cost and cost-effectiveness evaluations, health financing, implementation science, and the use of technology in healthcare.

Chiara holds a PhD and a MSc in Public Health from the University of Louvain, Belgium as well as a MA in Development Economics from the Institute of Social Studies, The Netherlands. Her current work at the CHH focuses on developing and piloting standardized public health indicators for out-of-camp emergency settings. She is also involved in a multi-country study on Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent health service delivery in conflict affected settings, in which she leads the DRC case study (North and South Kivu). She has also analyzed infectious disease outbreaks in refugee camps, as well as worked in the response to the Ebola outbreak in North Kivu and Ituri.

Before joining the Center for Humanitarian Health, Chiara has worked for the international Non-Governmental Organization Action Against Hunger (ACF) as Senior Research Advisor as well as Impact Assessment Advisor. She was in charge of the integration of impact measures in the Monitoring & Evaluation systems of ACF multisectoral programs, as well as of the design and implementation of impact evaluations of strategic operations. Prior to ACF, Chiara worked for several years at the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), where she investigated the impact of conflict and insecurity on the public health status of affected communities in terms of nutrition, mortality, vaccination coverage, livelihoods.

Dr. Augustinavicius is an Assistant Scientist in the Department of Mental Health. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, her work focuses on mental health assessment and intervention among populations exposed to adversity in low-resource settings. Her specific interests include mental health among conflict-affected populations, research-practice collaborations on mental health measurement and intervention in humanitarian settings, and mental health in the context of climate change.

Dan Barnett, MD, MPH is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Health & Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH), where he holds a joint appointment in Health Policy and Management.  His work focuses on leveraging applied research to examining and enhancing public health preparedness systems’ readiness for disasters across the all-hazards continuum and across the disaster lifecycle. He directs the Preparedness Certificate program at JHSPH, where he is on the Core Practice Faculty, and conducts preparedness and other trainings for the public health workforce as PI for the HRSA-funded Mid-Atlantic Regional Public Health Training Center - Johns Hopkins Local Performance Site

Dr. Bass is an associate professor in the Department of Mental Health with a joint appointment at the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She received her PhD in psychiatric epidemiology from Johns Hopkins, and Masters in Public Health and Masters in International Affairs from Columbia University.  Her areas of expertise include designing and evaluating methods for assessing mental health in non-Western cultures and investigating the effectiveness of innovative prevention and intervention strategies in collaboration with in-country service providers.  Her research interests include designing and evaluating methods for assessing mental health and mental illness in non-Western cultures with the intention for using these assessments to investigate effectiveness of innovative prevention and intervention strategies.  Dr. Bass is also interested in the interconnectedness of mental health and economic development with the goal of understanding how interventions and programs addressing each of these domains can be integrated to better improve health and well-being. Through this work, she is committed to improving the evidence-base for mental health and psychosocial programming in low-resource settings.  Dr. Bass is the principal investigator for two DRC randomized controlled trials to improve social, psychological and economic well-being of sexual violence survivors and a trial of caregiver interventions for HIV-affected families in Uganda.  Dr. Bass is also the Principal Investigator of an NIMH T32 training grant for pre- and post-doctoral fellows to study global mental health from a public health perspective.  Current and former projects include collaborating with NGOs and Academic Institutions in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe.

Dr Alexandra Blackwell is a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) T32 Global Mental Health Postdoctoral Fellow specializing in implementation science for violence prevention and mental health promotion with conflict-affected populations. She received her PhD in Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation at the University of Oxford, where her thesis focused on evaluating humanitarian interventions to promote child and family wellbeing. With over a decade of experience conducting mixed-methods research in emergencies, she has led research teams in conflict-affected communities in Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria, and South Sudan, among other countries. Her work has included population-based surveys, effectiveness studies, and human-centered and trauma-informed research and intervention design in collaboration with affected populations. As part of these initiatives, she has worked alongside diverse stakeholders, from children to policymakers, translate findings into action to support marginalized communities globally. Her current efforts include conducting a randomized controlled trial of an intervention to support conflict-affected families experiencing recruitment of children into armed forces and armed groups in the Central African Republic and adapting a youth violence intervention for forcibly displaced adolescents living in diverse contexts.

Research Interests:

• Violence prevention
• Mental health and psychosocial interventions
• Implementation science
• Exploring non-experimental methods for approximating causal effects

Paul Bolton MB BS MPH MSc is a Senior Scientist in the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Bolton has 25 years of experience in global mental health working in program design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation with international and local NGOs and governments. He has led programs and research in Europe (former Soviet Union), South-East Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, and the Pacific region. His research includes many randomized controlled trials exploring effectiveness and implementation practices for MHPSS interventions, as well as qualitative studies of population-specific needs and the development and testing of valid assessment instruments. Dr. Bolton focuses on collaboration with partners in low and middle-income countries to integrate mental health and psychosocial support into development and humanitarian programming. This is based on evidence that mental health is a major factor in health, well-being, and prosperity both directly and as a major determinant of program participation.

Dr. Burnham is the founder of the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response at Johns Hopkins. He has extensive experience in emergency preparedness and response, particularly in humanitarian needs assessment, program planning, and evaluation that address the needs of vulnerable populations, and the development and implementation of training programs. He has worked extensively in the development and evaluation of community-based health program planning and implementation, health information system development, management and analysis, and health system analysis. Dr Burnham's work has involved numerous humanitarian and development programs for multilateral and non-governmental organizations, regional health departments, ministries of health (national and district level), and communities in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. Recent activities include work with health systems and displaced populations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Jordan and Lebanon. Dr. Burnham teaches a number of graduate courses in public health of displaced populations and community health program development.

Dr. Cuneo is Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and affiliate faculty with the Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health and Human Rights and Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health. He practices clinically as a hospitalist for adults and children at Johns Hopkins Hospital in addition to providing primary care for immigrant survivors of torture at Esperanza Center in Baltimore, MD. He is the founding Executive Director for the HEAL Refugee Health & Asylum Collaborative, which is dedicated to expanding access to responsive health care and supportive services for immigrant survivors seeking refuge in the U.S.

 He further serves as one of three co-leads for the Asylum Medicine Training Initiative, a national educational platform that defines and disseminates best practices in the clinical evaluation of survivors of persecution seeking humanitarian protection. He has a background in global health delivery across diverse settings (including Haiti, Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East) and has provided clinical care and medicolegal support on the US-Mexico border in Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez in partnership with organizations such as Refugee Health Alliance, Al Otro Lado, and the International Refugee Assistance Project. 

His humanitarian work has been recognized nationally by organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Society for Hospital Medicine, and he was featured in a short documentary by the New England Journal of Medicine in 2023. He holds a BS from Duke University, an MD from Johns Hopkins University, and an MPH from Harvard University. He served as a Fulbright Fellow in South Africa from 2009-2010 and as a Harvard Medical School Doris Duke International Clinical Research Fellow in Haiti from 2013-2014. He completed his residency in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at the Harvard Combined Program at Brigham & Women's Hospital/Boston Children's Hospital, where he was Global Health Equity Chief Resident.

Dr. Darwish is an associate faculty at the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health studying complex humanitarian emergencies, particularly in the Middle East. Upon graduating with an MD from Damascus University, he joined the Red Crescent/Red Cross movement in Syria and Lebanon as the Coordinator of Emergency Medical Services and Disaster Management from 2016 to 2017.

Dr. Darwish led complex operations in the field, including conducting needs assessment of internally displaced civilians within siege areas, strategizing transport missions of critical medical supplies and equipment, and collaborating with donors to garner timely funding support. He also helped develop the emergency response program by training hundreds of staff and volunteers in health responses in crises, camp management, and emergency needs assessment. In 2017, he came to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to pursue a Master in Public Health as the first Refugee Scholar. He then stayed on as faculty in the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health researching the effects of the US fund cuts to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) on the health services of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan,  maternal and child health indicators in humanitarian settings and an assessment of the pharmaceutical sector in Syria using quantitative and qualitative tools and a mixed-methods approach. His research aims to inform sustainable, evidence-based health programs and policies in complex humanitarian emergencies.

My research focuses on populations affected by natural disasters and conflict, including both refugees and internally displaced populations in camp and non-camp settings. Within the context of humanitarian emergencies, my areas of interest include health service access and delivery, nutrition and food security, livelihoods and cash interventions. My work is centered on the development of context-specific approaches for population-based surveys, needs assessments and the monitoring and evaluation of humanitarian assistance programs, that are rigorous yet feasible to implement given situational constraints of emergency settings. The focus is on implementation science, with the aim of informing ongoing humanitarian assistance and health programs and in the longer-term, providing an evidence base for emergency response programs and policies. Recent research and evaluation projects have been implemented in collaboration with NGOs, UN agencies, and other academic institutions in a variety of countries including Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo among others.

Makieba is an Administrative Program Coordinator for the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health. She holds a B.A. in Media and Communications from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Makieba has extensive experience in administration, technology, and communications. 

Full time faculty in the department of International Health and co-instructs several management and primary health care courses at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She has over 15 years of experience mostly in Africa and Asia, providing technical assistance to several USAID funded initiatives for program planning and evaluation and developing community based systems for improved health service delivery including countries emerging from/or in post conflict like Cambodia, Rwanda, Mozambique, and Mindanao, Philippines. Her recent research has been focused on health system evaluation performance measures for the World Bank, PAHO, and JSI. The first partnership with the center began with the health reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan in 2002 with World Relief. Currently, she is a co-principal investigator for the evaluation of the Afghanistan Ministry’s national program for Strengthening Health Services for the Rural Poor and also the principal investigator for a feasibility research on community score cards to improve health service quality and utilization for the Future Health Systems Consortium. She also leads the JHU partnership with MSH for USAID’s Leadership Management and Governance Project.

Salomine Ekambi, MSPH is an early-career researcher with a Master of Sciences in Public Health focused on social and behavioral interventions and a Bachelor of Science in Public Health. She has experience in both qualitative and economic analyses particularly as it relates to sexual and reproductive health among adolescent girls and young women in East Africa. She will serve as JHU’s EQUAL Research Associate supporting activities across workstreams and cross-cutting initiatives.

Shatha Elnakib, PhD, MPH  is an Assistant Scientist in the International Health Department at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Her interests lie at the intersection of Sexual and Reproductive Health and humanitarian assistance.  Shatha leads several mixed-methods research projects focused on generating evidence to improve the quality of sexual and reproductive health services and policies in humanitarian settings. Prior to starting her faculty appointment, Shatha worked for INGOs and UN agencies including the Population Council, UNFPA, UNICEF and the World Health Organization. She holds an MPH in Epidemiology from Columbia University and a PhD in International Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

George S. Everly, Jr., PhD, ABPP, FACLP, is an award-winning author and researcher. He holds faculty appointments in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and in Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. In addition, he has served on the adjunct faculty of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the FBI’s National Academy at Quantico, Virginia. Dr. Everly holds Honorary Professorships at the Universidad de Flores, Buenos Aires, Argentina and Universidad de Weiner, Lima, Peru. He was a member of the CDC Mental Health Collaboration Committee  (having chaired the mental health competency development sub-committee), the Infrastructure Expert Team within the US Department of Homeland Security, and the NVOAD Early Psychological Intervention sub-committee. He was an advisor to the Hospital Authority of Hong Kong and served as Senior Advisor on research in human resilience to the Office of His Highness the Amir of Kuwait.  Dr. Everly is co-founder of, and served as a non-governmental representative to the United Nations for, the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation, a non-profit United Nations-affiliated public health and safety organization. Prior to these appointments, Dr. Everly was a visiting Fellow at Harvard University, a Harvard Scholar, visiting in psychology, Harvard University; and a Visiting Lecturer in Medicine, Harvard Medical School. He was formerly Chief Psychologist and Director of Behavioral Medicine for the Johns Hopkins' Homewood Hospital Center.

He is the author, co-author, or editor of 20 textbooks and over 100 professional papers.  Among his texts are THE JOHNS HOPKINS GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGICAL FIRST AID(Johns Hopkins Press, 2017), THE RESILIENT CHILD (DiaMedica, 2009, Foreword Magazine Gold Medal Winner),  PERSONALITY GUIDED THERAPY OF POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER (APA, 2004), and A CLINICAL GUIDE TO THE TREATMENT OF THE HUMAN STRESS RESPONSE, 3rd EDITION (Springer, 2013).  He has given invited lectures in 26 countries on 6 continents.  His works have been translated into Russian, Arabic, Swedish, Polish, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, German, Korean, and Spanish. His biography appears in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World and Wikipedia.

Dr. Falb is a social epidemiologist by training who uses qualitative and quantitative research approaches to collaboratively design, test, and scale violence against women and children prevention and response programs in humanitarian settings. She also focuses on advancing the science of adaptable, equitable, and rigorous research methods in challenging settings affected by armed conflict, climate change, or disaster. Before coming to academia, Dr. Falb served as Research Director of the International Rescue Committee where she oversaw a multidisciplinary humanitarian research team.  She is committed to creating actionable research that can influence programming and policies.

Dr. Sani Fatima is a Research Data Analyst with the Center for Humanitarian Health. She previously worked as a physician and contributed to public health projects in low-income neighborhoods and urban slums in Pakistan. She holds an MPH from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and an MBBS from Ziauddin University.

Caleb Figge, PhD is a clinical psychologist and Assistant Scientist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He received his PhD in Clinical Child Psychology from DePaul University, and completed his clinical internship at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. 

Dr. Figge's research aims to expand access to evidence-based mental health treatments in low- and middle-income countries. He is currently project director of an NIH-funded randomized controlled trial in Lusaka, Zambia, a HRSA- and CDC-funded mental health integration project in Uganda, and several other global health research and programming projects. He works closely with global partners including the NIH, HRSA, WHO, CDC, USAID, and local implementing partners. 

Dr. Figge has consulted on several large scale mental health research and programming projects in global settings.

Dr. George is an infectious disease epidemiologist and environmental engineer. Her career focuses on implementing interdisciplinary approaches that promote health equity to solve complex environmental health challenges in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and other low resource settings globally. Dr. George has 16 years of experience conducting water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) studies domestically and internationally, including directing nine randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of community and health facility-based WASH interventions. Her interdisciplinary research portfolio spans infectious disease and environmental epidemiology, genomics to investigate disease outbreaks, WASH RCTs, environmental engineering to evaluate water filtration technologies, and formative research driven by health behavior theory for the design and implementation of WASH behavioral interventions. Through employing these methods, Dr. George has partnered with communities to design effective WASH interventions to reduce diarrheal diseases and improve child growth in Bangladesh and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and reduce arsenic exposure in Bangladesh and in partnership with American Indian communities. Dr. George’s current research activities include directing seven WASH RCTs, and three cohort studies conducted in Bangladesh and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and in partnership with American Indian Nations.

Professor, Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing and Associate Director, Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health. Dr. Glass has 18 years of research experience in conducting clinical and community-based interventions with diverse populations across multiple settings domestically and globally. She is currently the PI of five federally funded (R01s NIH/NIMH, NICHD and NIMHD and CDC/NIOSH) multidisciplinary research studies to test employment, economic empowerment and safety interventions to improve the health and well-being of gender-based violence (GBV) survivors, youth and their families. She is the PI of a UNICEF funded study in Somalia and South Sudan to prevent and respond to GBV in humanitarian setting. She is a co-investigator on two US Department of State, Bureau of Population, Refugee and Migration (BPRM) funded partnership with the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) to develop and test a screening tool to identify survivors of GBV in displaced and refugee populations in Ethiopia, Uganda and Colombia. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in partnership with Congolese-led NGOs, Dr. Glass is currently funded by NIH (NIMHD and NICHD) to test the effectiveness of a village led microfinance program on the health and economic stability, including reintegration to family and community for GBV survivors and other vulnerable women and men as well as young adolescents (ages 10-15 years) living in rural villages.

Emily has extensive experience in the implementation and evaluation of programs addressing mental and behavioral health. Her background is in quantitative methods, advanced statistical approaches and epidemiology. She has conducted numerous studies to understand mental and behavioral health problems and programs across a wide range of diverse populations including conflict and torture affected population. Emily is faculty member of the Applied Mental Health Research (AMHR) group and has a joint appointment with the Center for American Indian Health.

Dr. Jeremiah Hinson is an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He earned his M.D. from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, New York and completed an emergency medicine residency at Johns Hopkins. He also holds a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Pathology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Hinson is an active emergency medicine clinician, serving as an attending physician in the Emergency Departments of both Johns Hopkins Hospital and Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. 

His research interests include emergency department operations, acute kidney injury and infectious disease.  He is particularly focused on the improvement of patient outcomes using data-driven methods. Dr. Hinson is Co-Director of the Center for Data Science in Emergency Medicine that includes experts from the fields of biomedical engineering, data science and mathematical ecology - all focused on the common goal of improving care delivery for emergency department patients. Their team has created important cross-disciplinary partnerships and developed novel tools that enhance the practice of emergency medicine, including through an improved approach to emergency department triage and more accurate identification of risk factors for acute kidney injury. Their team is currently focused on using similar methods to improve infectious disease management in the ED and to predict and prevent acute kidney injury, work for which Dr. Hinson has been awarded grants from the Emergency Medicine Foundation and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. 

Edbert Hsu, M.D., M.P.H., FACEP, is a board-certified emergency physician who has combined his background in international health with a special interest in disaster medicine in working on program development, disaster preparedness, and training around the world. In recent years, he has been interested in the topic of mass gatherings and crowd disasters. Currently, he serves on the leadership group of the Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response (CEPAR). He has been a co-investigator with the DHS Center for the Study of Preparedness and Catastrophic Event Response (PACER) at Johns Hopkins and co-principal investigator on a CDC sponsored project related to recognizing best practices in public health emergency response leadership training. Dr. Hsu has completed military training in the management of chemical and biological casualties and has extensive experience in the evaluation of disaster drills. Dr. Hsu serves as a member of the Committee on Evidence-Based Practices for Public Health Preparedness and Response with the National Academy of Sciences and as an Associate Editor for the peer-reviewed journal, Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness.

Benjamin Huynh, PhD, develops AI and data science methods for applications in environmental and humanitarian health. His work focuses on adapting cutting-edge computational methods to advance health equity for marginalized populations affected by climate change, such as refugees and those in humanitarian contexts. He completed his PhD in Biomedical Data Science from Stanford University, and a BS in Statistics from the University of Chicago. He has previously worked in data science roles at the World Health Organization and Médecins Sans Frontières. 

Takeru (Tak) Igusa is a professor of civil and systems engineering and a leading expert in systems science. He is known for bringing new insights to complex problems in the health sciences through the use of systems principles and analytical techniques.

Igusa’s background in engineering and applied mathematics has allowed him to work across a diversity of fields, from epidemiology to community resilience to civil and mechanical structures. The collaborative and multidisciplinary nature of his research has led to joint appointments in the departments of Mental Health and International Health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH), and in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. He also holds a secondary appointment in the Whiting School of Engineering’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics.

Mung Yao Jia is a Research Associate in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her current research focuses on working with displacement data from Mali and Iraq and looking at potential climate drivers of displacement and migration. Her other research interests are in human-centered AI and healthcare applications of CS, where she has prior experience working with PICU patients and ventilator waveform data.

Dr. Seth Judson, MD is a Fellow in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His research focuses on translating principles from the ecology and epidemiology of globally emerging zoonotic and vector-borne diseases to improve early detection and mitigation of outbreaks. He is currently developing risk maps, surveillance methods, and transmission modeling tools that policymakers can use for diagnostic resource allocation for arboviruses and hemorrhagic fever viruses. His work takes place at the human-animal and clinical-public health interfaces in Africa and Latin America. With the Center for Humanitarian Health, he hopes to elucidate the effects of climate change on the emergence of zoonotic and vector-borne diseases among vulnerable populations, as well as improve access to data for pandemic preparedness and humanitarian response. Dr. Judson was an Internal Medicine Resident in the Global Health Pathway at the University of Washington. He received his MD at UCLA and a Bachelor of Science in Biology with Honors and Distinction at Stanford University.

Naoko Kozuki MSPH, PhD is the Health Research Advisor at the International Rescue Committee. She oversees the health research portfolio of the organization, and leads the organization’s research priority area of reducing under-five deaths through the use of community health workers, and is also the organizational focal point for MNCH and nutrition research. She completed her Masters, Doctoral, and Postdoctoral training with the Department of International Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and serves as Associate Faculty for the same department and George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health.  She has conducted research in countries including Somalia, South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, and Nepal.

Molly Lasater is an Associate in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH). She received her MPH at JHSPH, and her PhD from JHSPH’s Department of International Health with a focus in social and behavioral interventions. She is a former NIMH Ruth L. Kirschstein Predoctoral Individual National Research Service fellow and former NIMH-T32 global mental health postdoctoral research fellow.  A major focus of my research has been the design, implementation and evaluation of mental health and psychosocial support interventions among populations living in contexts of adversity, globally. Currently, my primary research interest is in using mixed-methods to understand the multifaceted relationship between common mental disorders, violent conflict, and climate change to inform the development of effective strategies to promote the mental health and psychosocial well-being of women and children living in situations of complex adversity in low- and middle-income country contexts.

Catherine is an Associate with the Departments of International Health and Mental Health, as well as the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr Lee has extensive public health program implementation and research with over sixteen years of in-depth experience in Southeast Asia with a focus on populations Thailand and Myanmar. She is proficient in Thai language and conversant in Myanmar language. Her research expertise focuses on the application of qualitative research to the design and evaluation of interventions, specifically focused on conflict-affected and humanitarian settings and mental health and psychosocial support programs, as well as input from local communities on these processes. She also has experience designing and conducting multiple randomized controlled trials of mental health interventions. She is the Founder and Director of Global Reach Consulting, LLC, a company that provides technical advising services to governments, international non-governmental organizations, universities, and donors to design, implement, and evaluate public health interventions in conflict-affected and low- and middle-income countries.

Dr. Lyles is an associate faculty in the Department of International Health where her work focuses on providing an evidence base for humanitarian assistance programs and policies in conflict-affected and fragile states. Within the humanitarian context, her research interests include continuity of care and access to essential medicines for chronic health conditions; cash-based intervention; population-based assessments, including the epidemiology of conflict and population needs; and monitoring and evaluation of humanitarian assistance programs. She has a strong background in systems research with expertise in quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods approaches and in translation of implementation research findings into actionable recommendations for policy and practice in conflict-affected settings. 

Recent research and technical assistance projects have been implemented in collaboration with NGOs, UN agencies, and academic institutions in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, and South Sudan on topics of health care access and utilization, food security, and cash programming.

Meighan Mary is a health systems researcher with over a decade of experience in reproductive, maternal, and neonatal health clinical and implementation research in the U.S, sub-Saharan Africa, SE Asia, and Middle East and North Africa regions. Her research aims to translate clinical evidence into effective maternal and neonatal health programming using mixed methods implementation science, with focus on strengthening linkages between communities and health systems, measurement of quality of care, and maternal and perinatal death surveillance and response (MPDSR).  

Dr. Mary is currently co-investigator on the Evidence and Impact for Mothers and Newborns Living in Conflict (EQUAL) research consortium where she co-leads research on MPDSR systems in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and quality of facility-based maternal and newborn care in DRC and Nigeria. She is also co-investigator on Jhpiego’s Accelerating Measurable Progress and Leveraging Investments for Postpartum Haemorrhage Impact (AMPLI-PPHI) project, co-leading research that aims to assess feasibility and acceptability of a package of PPH interventions (misoprostol, heat-stable carbetocin, and tranexamic acid) in Guinea, DRC, Kenya, and India. Domestically, she is a co-investigator on the Maryland Maternal Health Innovation Program (MDMOM) and serves as a scientific liaison with the NIH Maternal Health Data Innovation and Coordination Hub. 

Dr. Linda Mobula is a Senior Health Specialist with the World Bank. She formally served as a Public Health and Infectious Disease advisor with the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). She also works as a Hospitalist Physician with Johns Hopkins Community Physicians and is an Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

She recently served as the technical lead for the 10th outbreak Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo with the World Bank. She provided clinical care to Ebola patients in Monrovia, Liberia at the ELWA-2 Ebola Treatment Center with Samaritan’s Purse during the summer of 2014.  She served as a Public Health Advisor and Deputy Team Leader for the USAID/OFDA Ebola Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) in Guinea, and subsequently served as the Acting Senior Humanitarian Advisor for the USAID/OFDA Ebola response in Guinea. 

She also served as the Chief Medical Officer for the Samaritan’s Purse response to the 2013 Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines and was the Senior Program Manager for the UNHCR funded Samaritan’s Purse European Refugee Response in Greece in 2016. She previously worked in the Office of HIV/AIDS at USAID where she provided technical assistance to South Sudan, DRC, Mozambique, and Burundi.

She obtained a Bachelor of Science with Honors from the University of AZ in 2004 and attended medical school at the University of California, San Francisco. She obtained a Masters in Public Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health with a concentration in Health in Crisis and Humanitarian assistance. She completed residency in Internal Medicine at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. During her residency, she made multiple trips as a medical volunteer to Haiti with Samaritan's Purse, working at a primary care clinic in Cite Soleil, Haiti’s largest and poorest slum. She later served as the Medical Director for Samaritan's Purse Health programs in Haiti from 2011-2012, where she oversaw the Cite Soleil Clinic and a Maternal Child Health Program. She completed a Post-Doctoral fellowship in the Division of General Internal Medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital.  From 2014-2017, she was the Co-Principal Investigator for the Gates-funded Ghana Access and Affordability Program which aims to improve access to treatment for Non-Communicable Diseases.

J. Stephen Morrison is senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) where he founded and heads its Global Health Policy Center. Dr. Morrison currently directs the CSIS Commission on Strengthening America's Health Security, a major effort started in 2018 that addresses the geopolitical dimensions of pandemic preparedness and response and the requirements for a more coherent and sustainable US approach, at home and abroad. He is an authority on US foreign policy and a regular commentator on China, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and infectious diseases and humanitarian emergencies. Since 2017, he has directed and produced a series of video documentaries, most notably The New Barbarianism, an award- winning study of violence against the health sector in Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan. 2020-2022 he has been honored as the James S. Schlesinger Distinguished Scholar at the University of Virginia. He served in senior positions in the Clinton administration, as senior committee staff in the House Foreign Affairs Committee,  and taught for 12 years at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin and is a magna cum laude graduate of Yale College.

A Professor in the Departments of Epidemiology, International Health and Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Head of Epidemiology at the International Vaccine Access Center. He is a pediatrician with subspecialty training in infectious diseases, and has worked in Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe and India among other countries. His broad research interests are the epidemiology and control of childhood infections in resource-poor countries. The specific focus of his current research is in understanding the impact of the HIV epidemic on measles control and eradication, the epidemiology and control of malaria in southern Africa, and the care and treatment of HIV-infected children in rural Zambia.

An Assistant Professor in the Department of International Health, Center for Humanitarian Health. A clinical psychologist by training, she has expertise in children, adolescents, and families. Dr. Murray is highly trained in numerous evidence-based treatments, with a particular specialty in researching and treating trauma and grief. She is currently an expert trainer in Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT). Dr. Murray has expertise in clinical manual adaptation, cross-cultural training, and the implementation and dissemination of evidence-based practices. Her research interests include the treatment of HIV-affected children who have experienced trauma and/or grief, assessment of mental and behavioral health, as well as training on, adapting and testing evidence-based mental health interventions in low-resource environments. Two current projects include working with NGOs and government ministries in Zambia to integrate mental health assessment and treatment into existing HIV-care infrastructures and evaluate their effectiveness, and in Cambodia on the implementation of an evidence-based treatment for trafficked youth.

Sarah McIvor Murray is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH). Her interest in health in the context of violence emerged when working for the International Rescue Committee in refugee resettlement, and then later with Global Health Access Program/Community Partners International on the Thai-Myanmar border. She received her MSPH in the Social and Behavioral Interventions track of the JHSPH International Health department, and her PhD from JHSPH’s Department of Mental Health with a focus in psychiatric epidemiology. She is also a former NIMH-T32 global mental health postdoctoral research fellow. 

Dr. Kathleen Page, MD, is an Associate Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.  Her work focuses on improving access and quality of care to underserved communities in Baltimore. She provides HIV, HCV and substance use disorder care at the Bartlett Clinic at JHU and the Baltimore City Health Department STD clinics. She co-founded Centro SOL (Center for Salud/Health and Opportunities for Latinos) which is developing novel strategies to meet the health needs of Latino migrants through research, education, community advocacy, and clinical care.  She is also the Baltimore City Health Department’s Director of STD/HIV/HCV/TB Clinical Services.  She is the principal investigator for an NIH-funded cluster randomized trial evaluating a mobile clinic that provides integrated care to people with opiate use disorder, and on a PCORI-funded randomized controlled study evaluating the impact of a mHealth-enhanced retention support on HIV virologic suppression.  She has also worked with Human Rights Watch to assess the impact of the Venezuelan crisis on public health.  Dr. Page is a recipient of the JHU Diversity Recognition Award, the Mayor’s Hispanic Heritage Award, the Johns Hopkins President’s Award, and the Clinical Excellence Award, and was a JHU SOM 125th Anniversary “Living the Hopkins Mission” Honoree.

Earned a medical degree at the New York University School of Medicine and a master’s degree in public health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He completed a residency in emergency medicine at Kern Medical Center in Bakersfield, California, in 2009 and a fellowship in international emergency medicine at The Johns Hopkins University in 2011.

Dr. Pham joined the emergency medicine faculty after completing his fellowship. He has worked on implementing measures of public health indicators in displaced populations in Sudan, India, Ethiopia and Colombia. More recently, he has worked on the use of health information systems to measure population health as it pertains to emergency department visits. He is pursuing a Ph.D. in the Graduate Training Program in Clinical Investigation at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Dr. Qaddour is the director of the 501(c)(3) humanitarian NGO Syria Relief & Development. She holds an associate faculty appointment at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Department of International Health and the school's Center for Humanitarian Health. She holds a Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) degree from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health along with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in Human Biology and Psychology and a Master's in Health Services Administration (MHSA), both from the University of Kansas. For the 2022-2023 academic year, she was a visiting scholar at Brown University in its Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. 

As a passionate practitioner and academic, she has guest lectured on various humanitarian, public health, and human rights topics at various universities, including Johns Hopkins, Brown, Georgetown, Emory, Tulane, American University of Beirut, Carleton University, and the Naval War College. In 2020, she received the Outstanding Leadership & Advocacy Award in Maternal and Child Health by the American Public Health Association. In 2020, she also briefed the United Nations Security Council alongside ERC Mark Lowcock and again in 2021 alongside ERC Martin Griffiths, in addition to other speaking engagements at the Atlantic Council, International Peace Institute, Brookings Institution, United States Institute of Peace, Center for Strategic and International Studies, and The Washington Institute. She has held multiple leadership and advisory roles, including her most recent on the World Health Organization Implementing Best Practices Network Steering Committee and DisasterReady Advisory Group. 

As a health economist, my primary area of interest is in health care financing. My related areas of interest  include – economic evaluation, human resources for health, and program process and impact evaluations. I also teach graduate level courses in health care financing. I have extensive research experience working on these issues in India and other low and middle-income countries. I have conducted studies on patient health care costs in India and Afghanistan, resource tracking for HIV/AIDS, TB, and Malaria control programs in Mozambique and Senegal, and evaluated national health insurance programs and community health insurance schemes in India and Afghanistan. I have conducted evaluations of clinician knowledge and skills in primary health care contexts. I have carried out experiments to identify incentives for retention of health workers in underserved areas, conducted impact evaluations of quality interventions, conducted facility audits of health centers, and hospitals. I have extensive experience in designing, conducting, and analyzing large sample surveys of households and health facilities.

Sanjana Ravi is a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an Assistant Scientist in the Department of Environmental Health & Engineering at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her work focuses on understanding and improving health system responses to a range of public health threats. Her research includes analyses of challenges related to the emergency dissemination of novel medical countermeasures, strategies for strengthening healthcare coalitions, building equitable community health systems, and risk communication challenges during public health emergencies. She is also an Associate Editor and Academic Editor of the peer-reviewed journals Health Security and PLOS Global Public Health, respectively.

Dr. Ravi completed a Ph.D. in Health Systems through the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where her doctoral research examined last-mile challenges in vaccine delivery, post-epidemic routine immunization challenges, and vaccination equity in resource-constrained settings. Previously, she received an MPH in infectious disease management, intervention, and community practice from the University of Pittsburgh and served as a Global Impact Fellow with Unite for Sight in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, delivering basic eye care to underserved regions. She is also a member of the Delta Omega Public Health Honorary Society.

Courtland Robinson received his PhD in Demography from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2004 and is now an Associate Professor in the Department of International Health (with a joint appointment in the Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health) and also Deputy Director of the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response. He has worked in the field of refugee and disaster programs and policy since 1979, with positions in the United States (Indochina Refugee Action Center and the US Committee for Refugees) and internationally (Save the Children, World Education, Mercy Corps and the Asian Research Center for Migration). His research interests have focused on populations in migration, whether displaced by conflict or natural disaster, or in the context of migrant labor and human trafficking.  Recent projects include: evaluation of the impact of humanitarian aid on durable solutions for populations displaced by the tsunami in Indonesia; measuring impact of migration and displacement on physical and mental health of older adults in the Republic of Georgia; a study of drought and famine on mortality and displacement in Somalia; and a three-country study of sexual and reproductive needs and services for very young adolescent (10-14 year old) refugees (Somalis in Ethiopia, Burmese in Thailand, and Syrians in Lebanon).

Mr. Rubenstein is a lawyer who has spent his career in human rights, and now focuses particularly on health and human rights, especially the protection of health in armed conflict, and the roles of health professionals in human rights. At Johns Hopkins he is core faculty of the Center for Public Health and Human Rights and the Berman Institute of Bioethics. Prior to coming to Johns Hopkins he served as Executive Director and then President of Physicians for Human Rights, as a Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, and as Executive Director of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. Mr. Rubenstein’s current work includes advancing protection of health facilities, patients, and health workers in situations of conflict, developing a screening tool to identify survivors of sexual and gender-based violence in refugee settings, and exploring ethical responsibilities of health professionals to advance human rights. Mr. Rubenstein founded and chairs the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition.

Samira Sami’s research has focused on reproductive health research in low and middle income countries to improve programs and policies during humanitarian emergencies. She has experience in emergency response and field research that inform the design and evaluation of gender-based violence (GBV) and maternal and newborn programs. She was previously a Health Scientist in the International Emergency and Refugee Health Branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) leading research and evaluation on reproductive health in emergency and post-conflict settings. Currently, she is interested in pursuing research that addresses the challenges of implementing evidence-based maternal and neonatal interventions in humanitarian settings using mixed methods. Her research spans across sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East, South Asia, and urban and rural populations.

Research associate in the Department of Emergency Medicine where she studies quality of aid in response to disasters and the effects of disasters on healthcare infrastructure. She joined the department in 2005 and became research faculty in 2011. Lauren is also the Program Manager for the National Center for Preparedness and Catastrophic Event Response, a Homeland Security Center of Excellence.  She is the current co-chair for the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine’s Disaster Interest Group and the Co-Director for the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine disaster course. She is a Core Team Leader on the Johns Hopkins Go Team, a deployable Medical Asset. She has worked remotely and on the ground on several disaster responses including Hurricane Katrina, the 2009 California Wildfires, the Haiti earthquake and the Pakistan floods. Lauren has spoken both nationally and internationally on a variety of disaster medicine topics and has participated in the US Navy’s Continuing Promise missions in 2010 and 2011 and Pacific Partnership Mission in 2012. She has authored and co-authored numerous publications in disaster medicine, public health preparedness and surge capacity metrics.

Anita Shankar, PhD, is a medical anthropologist with more than 25 years of research and field experience targeted at improving women’s empowerment as well as maternal and child health. Her research focuses on investigating and testing innovative cognitive-behavioral interventions directed at fostering personal agency as a means of catalyzing positive behavior change. Her research focuses along three intersecting lines of research (1) understanding factors impacting the expanded distribution and use of clean energy technologies in resource poor settings; (2) examining the role of women, as entrepreneurs and primary household energy managers, as essential levers for improved health through effective engagement along clean energy value chains and (3) laying the scientific foundation and tools for personal agency-based empowerment interventions to increase human adaptability, secure livelihoods and improve health.

Dr. Shankar is a lead author on the Empowered Entrepreneur training handbook and has led a global training of trainers’ program to scale this initiative to clean energy organizations worldwide. She is Principal Investigator for an ongoing randomized controlled trial in Rwandan refugee camps to assess the impacts of clean cookstove technologies and a couples’ based personal agency intervention on decreasing the risk of both non-partner and intimate-partner violence in humanitarian settings.

Yusra Shawar MPH PhD is an Assistant Scientist in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and holds a joint courtesy appointment at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Her research concerns the global governance of health and the politics of health policy processes. She examines the role that knowledge-based communities—known as epistemic communities—play in agenda-setting processes, both at the global and national levels. Recently, she conducted research on the political prioritization of surgery, urban health, early childhood development, and rheumatic heart disease in the global health agenda, and learning in the global education agenda. She also investigates the politics surrounding the adoption and implementation of controversial and innovative health policies targeting vulnerable populations in low-income countries. 

She has collaborated with local partners in Lebanon, Jordan, the West Bank, Mongolia, and Nigeria. Her research has been funded by Save the Children USA, the Conrad N Hilton Foundation, the Center for Global Health at the University of Virginia, the Office of the Provost at American University, Stanford University, USAID, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, and Oak Foundation. She has been involved in two Lancet series concerning early childhood development and gender norms and equality in global health. She received her undergraduate and master’s degree in public health from the University of Virginia, her doctorate from the department of Public Administration and Public Policy at American University, and she completed her post-doctoral fellowship in the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.

Anita Shet is a pediatrician and a public health specialist with broad interests in childhood infections and vulnerable populations in low and middle-income countries. Her research areas span pediatric and adolescent HIV, childhood immunization, maternal and child nutrition, and social determinants of health. Her practice areas include addressing pandemic-related disruptions of routine childhood vaccination and essential health services, and advocacy efforts to expand vaccine access and coverage globally. She also focuses on empowering disadvantaged children and youth to live with good health and dignity. 

She currently leads a multicenter project evaluating the programmatic impact of the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine in India. She is the principal investigator of a global project on vaccine advocacy in countries that are yet to introduce life-saving pneumococcal and rotavirus preventing vaccines. In addition, she directs the Johns Hopkins Maternal and Child Health India program that focuses on addressing health issues among women, infants and children, and strengthening public health capacity in India.

She has published widely in her interest areas, with over 120 peer-reviewed scientific publications and several book chapters and invited reviews. She was recognized for excellence in teaching for her JHU courses in 2018-2020, and is a recipient of the Discovery Award in 2022, the Wellcome Trust Senior Fellowship award in 2013, and the International Young Women Physician-Scientist Award in 2008 presented by the International Society for Infectious Diseases.  She is an enthusiastic teacher and enjoys mentoring students. Apart from work she is happiest when hanging out with her family and dogs.

Dr. Erin M. Sorrell is a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an Associate Professor (PAR) in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. For the last ten years Dr. Sorrell has applied her technical laboratory training in virology and experience in government to contribute to global health security as a practitioner and an academic. Her current research portfolio combines the disciplines of basic science, biosafety and health systems strengthening to address infectious disease threats whether they be novel, emerging or re-emerging. Her work focuses on developing and applying a variety of methodologies to map, assess, and address both the structure and function of health systems. Erin collaborates across the U.S. government, international organizations, and ministries around the world to identify elements required to support health systems strengthening and laboratory capacity building for disease detection, reporting, risk assessment, and response. She is also interested in operational and implementation research questions related to sustainable health systems strengthening, with an emphasis on the prevention, management, and control of infectious diseases in humanitarian situations, and particularly countries and regions affected by conflict. In addition to her research, Dr. Sorrell has designed and taught a number of courses on emerging infectious disease threats and disease detection and response in conflict settings. She previously served as the Director of Graduate Studies for the Biohazardous Threat Agents & Emerging Infectious Diseases M.Sc. Program at Georgetown University. Before joining the faculty, Dr. Sorrell was an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University. Prior to that she was a Senior Research Scientist at The George Washington University, Milken Institute School of Public Health. She also served as an American Association for the Advancement of Science, Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the Department of State where she worked on foreign assistance activities in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa. Dr. Sorrell was a postdoctoral fellow both at Erasmus Medical Center, the Netherlands and the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research focused on the molecular mechanisms of interspecies transmission, primarily focusing on avian to human transmission of influenza A viruses. Dr. Sorrell received her undergraduate degree in animal science from Cornell University and an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in animal science and virology from the University of Maryland. She is an ELBI alumna and previous term member at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Dr. Spiegel is a physician by training, is internationally recognized for his research on preventing and responding to complex humanitarian emergencies. Before becoming Center for Humanitarian Health Director, Paul was the deputy director of the Division of Programme Management and Support Services for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Prior to joining the UN in 2002, Paul worked as a medical epidemiologist in the International Emergency and Refugee Health Branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He also worked as a medical coordinator with Médecins Sans Frontières and Médecins du Monde in refugee emergencies, as well as a consultant for numerous organizations.

Hannah Tappis, DrPH, MPH is a Senior Measurement, Evaluation and Learning Advisor at Jhpiego  - an affiliate of Johns Hopkins University, and associate faculty in the Department of International Health where her work focuses on generating and using evidence to improve the quality of reproductive, maternal and child health services in conflict-affected settings. She has more than 15 years of experience working with Ministries of Health, UN agencies, international and local NGOs in Africa, Asia and the Middle East and is currently co-chair of the Interagency Working Group for Reproductive Health in Crisis (IAWG) maternal and newborn heath committee, and member of multiple other interagency initiatives focused on strengthening health systems and services in crisis-affected settings.  Recent projects include a national assessment of the quality of maternal and newborn health services in and evaluations of health workforce development and health service strengthening initiatives in Afghanistan; case studies of RMNCAH and nutrition in conflict-affected areas of South Sudan, DRC and Yemen; evaluations of impacts of cash assistance, shelter and protection programs for refugees in Europe; implementation of lean-season food assistance programming in Zimbabwe; impact and cost-effectiveness of point-of-use water treatment in community management of acute malnutrition in Pakistan; gender impacts of multipurpose cash assistance for Syrian refugees in Lebanon; and economic impacts of cash and voucher assistance programs in Northern Syria.

Paolo Verme is a Lead Economist, Manager of the Research Program on Forced Displacement, and Head of Research and Impact Evaluations in the Fragility, Conflict, and Violence group of the World Bank. A PhD graduate of the London School of Economics, he was a visiting professor at Bocconi University and the University of Torino between 2003 and 2010.  He is the author of 5 books and over 50 articles covering labor markets, social protection, subsidies, poverty, income distribution, and forced migration in high, middle, and low-income countries. He is an accredited Full Professor of Public Economics, Economic Policy, and Economic Statistics in Italy and a Fellow of the Global Labor Organization. For a period of two decades prior to joining the World Bank, he served as senior adviser and project manager for the European Union, United Nations, NGOs, private consulting groups, and governments specializing in the design, implementation, and evaluation of welfare and labor reforms. An Italian national, Paolo speaks five languages fluently and has worked, lived, or traveled in over one hundred and twenty countries across five continents. He is currently ranked in the top 4% of world economists for publications in the past 10 years by IDEAS/Repec, and in the top 1% among world social scientists by SSRN.

Mija Ververs completed her studies of Nutrition (1985), Medicine (1991) in The Netherlands, and obtained an MPH (1997) at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She joined the Center for Humanitarian Health at the Johns Hopkins School and is also a visiting health scientist at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  Mija has over 35 years of experience and worked with more than 15 organizations varying from international NGOs (e.g. Doctors Without Borders, Action Contre la Faim, Save the Children) International Committee of the Red Cross, IFRC, United Nations (WHO, UNHCR, UNICEF, Global Nutrition Cluster), Governments and Academic institutions. Her field of expertise lies in nutrition (malnutrition, case management/infectious diseases, micronutrient deficiencies), public health, food security, and livelihoods programming. She worked in humanitarian settings in over 25 countries affected by conflict or natural disasters.

As a nutritionist and maternal and child health specialist, Shelley Walton has a portfolio focused on food security, humanitarian policy and practice, food assistance, wasting and stunting, infant and young child feeding, and implementation science. Her research aims to improve nutrition and health outcomes among populations in low resource settings. She has a strong interest in generating and translating evidence to impact stronger policies and programs to reach children, women, and adolescents more effectively. 

Over the past 10 years Shelley has contributed to the field of maternal and child nutrition in Africa and Asia. Before joining the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the Department of International Health in 2019, she managed the USAID Food Aid Quality Review at Tufts University, Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. While there, her work was underpinned by cost-effectiveness field research trials on malnutrition, food assistance design and implementation, humanitarian policy analysis, and translation of nutrition science to practice. As faculty at the JHSPH Institute for International Programs and Center for Human Nutrition, her projects focus on 1) providing evidence for advocacy, planning, and accountability to enhance reproductive, maternal, newborn, child, adolescent health & nutrition 2) improving methods, evidence, estimates, and programming to promote improved measurement of nutrition & MNCH intervention coverage.

She has worked closely with USAID (Office of Food for Peace, Bureau for Food Security and Bureau for Global Health), USDA (McGovern-Dole Food for Education), NIH, WFP, UNICEF, Global Financing Facility, The World Bank, non-governmental organizations, Ministries of Health, industry, and global academic partners. Shelley serves as the CORE Group’s Nutrition Working Group co-chair and along with the other co-chairs, she provides technical leadership and facilitate a group of nutrition practitioners, researchers, policy leaders, and funders to further the strategic development of standards, activities and products that will advance a joint technical nutrition agenda. 

Shelley is a Registered Dietitian and earned her BS in Nutrition Science from The Pennsylvania State University and her MPH from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Dr. Weiss is a public health specialist with over 20 years of experience in working with and supporting health and humanitarian assistance programs in Africa, Asia and Latin America.  His expertise is in the assessment, monitoring and evaluation of programs, including rapid assessment methods, health information systems, and digital health (eHealth and mHealth).  He has extensive experience with quantitative methods, and qualitative and participatory assessment methods.  Specific applications include household surveys, health facility surveys, clinical information systems, participatory learning and action methods, mobile data collection applications, and surveillance systems.  At the JHU Center for Humanitarian Health he lectures in Center courses and provides support to staff of NGOs and local government officials in the design, collection and analysis of useful for: (1) assessing health problems, knowledge and practices among refugees and internally displaced persons during transition and resettlement; and (2) participatory planning to solve health and development problems. Dr. Weiss received his DrPH degree in international health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Weiss' MA degree in International Affairs is from the George Washington University with a focus in international development.  Dr. Weiss has lived in Latin America and Asia and speaks Spanish, Portuguese and Italian.

Dr. Wirtz’s research is dedicated to the field of epidemiologic assessment of infectious disease and health among marginalized populations, including men who have sex with men, sex workers, transgender women, and refugees, displaced, and stateless populations. Dr. Wirtz has specific interest in developing measures and methods to assess risks, outcomes and effective health interventions for these populations.  Research topics include epidemiological and intervention research related to violence, stigma, disparities in access to healthcare, and infectious disease, particularly HIV infection; implementation science methods for key populations; and capacity building among local, community-based partners. Dr. Wirtz has been involved in research in Russia, Kazakhstan, Thailand, Myanmar, Ethiopia, Malawi, Kenya, Somalia, Uganda, Cote d’Ivoire, Dominican Republic, Colombia, and Peru.

Dr. Linnea Zimmerman has a background in demography and focuses on family planning and women's reproductive health research.​ She is PI of the PMA Ethiopia project, a longitudinal study implemented in Ethiopia to evaluate use and barriers to critical maternal and newborn health interventions. As the Associate Director of Research for PMA2020, Dr. Zimmerman works with the leadership team and country partners to develop and implement research across all of our countries and work to improve PMA2020 data utilization and accessibility. She is interested in the intersection of reproductive health and humanitarian emergencies, and  wrote her dissertation on techniques for indirect estimation of mortality during and after humanitarian emergencies.​​ She has a PhD from the Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a Masters in Public Health from Emory University.