2019 LEAP Workshop Participants

Ezinne Akudinobi

Ezinne Akudinobi is a graduate student in the Master of Public Health program at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Neuroscience from the University of Southern California. Before graduate school, she was a clinical data associate for an evidence-based medicine software and data company. She worked on projects that provided insights into the safety and efficacy of interventions to pharmaceutical companies, clinical guideline organizations, and healthcare professionals.

Since middle school, Ezinne has worked with non-governmental organizations, health professionals, and community members to promote health programs and policies that advocate for the wellbeing of under-served communities, specifically with individuals and families experiencing homelessness. In 2009, she was introduced into the world of policy at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in New York, where she presented a paper entitled The Way Forward: What the Future Should Hold for Every Child-Girl or Boy.

Ashi Arora

Ashi Arora, she/her/hers, currently a 1st year medical student at Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington, DC. She graduated with a BS in Public Health and Certification in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI, in May 2019. Ashi’s involvement in menstrual advocacy began with pitching a menstrual health management coalition within Detroit at a social innovation challenge in 2017, and she was awarded a grant to do so through a two-fold approach: (1) engaging in service, advocacy, and educational workshops in high-risk communities through the creation of a student organization; and (2) focus group research with women living in homeless shelters in Detroit, studying their menstrual and reproductive health experiences with a goal of helping shelters to shape their policies and programs. In the summer of 2018, she also partnered with staff of an NGO in South Rajasthan- Seva Mandir- to pilot a menstrual education curriculum that destigmatizes periods in the South Asian community and promotes self-care.

She serves as the current Community and Public Health chair of the American Medical Student Association (AMSA), and coordinated AMSA’s 20th anniversary of National Primary Care Week, with a focus on empowering students and physicians to take action in their communities to elevate the discourse around building the primary care workforce and primary care physicians’ crucial role in preventing disease, eliminating health disparities, and LGBTQ health. Serving as AMSA’s previous Gender and Sexuality Chair and working with an organization in Detroit to prevent preterm birth in high risk pregnant women, Ashi is energized to focus on reproductive justice during her medical career. Her goal is to pursue a career in medicine and health policy in urban communities. Ashi is passionate about ameliorating underlying barriers and disparities that prevent marginalized, oppressed communities from accessing tools to live healthy and happy lives. Detroit, the true American city in her eyes, has fueled her passion to target these challenges and serve her community.

Dhiksha Balaji

I am a first year medical student at Case Western Reserve University passionate about increasing access to healthcare. I graduated from Yale University in 2018 with a degree in English, then spent a year in Washington DC at Medstar Health studying the care of women living with HIV. My background in advocacy began when I was a fellow at Women’s Health Research at Yale, where I noticed the lack of digestible and informative information about women’s health research. In response, I designed and published a website called “Why Didn’t I Know This?” to help women and others gain access to information. My passion for advocacy also led me to join the Yale Refugee Project (YRP) Advocacy Team, a group working to create job opportunities for refugees in New Haven by helping them start businesses.

Now, I am primarily interested in healthcare delivery innovation, from a policy, economic, and patient-centered level. At Case, I am involved in the Pathway for Health Innovation and Entrepreneurship as well as Universities Allied Against Expensive Medications, which led me to this year’s workshop. I am very excited to learn from others’ experiences and bring actionable ideas back home to advocate for access to medicines.

Olivia Bonardi

Olivia is in her third year of undergraduate studies in Anatomy and Cell Biology at McGill University. Apart from cells, she is interested in the intersection of health and culture which she explores through her anthropology minor. Olivia’s research on the Tuberculosis crisis among indigenous communities in Canada and her personal experience volunteering at Boston Health Care for the Homeless Person drew her attention to the fact that while the West celebrates medical innovation, accessible healthcare remains a privilege.

Olivia is an executive for McGill’s Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM) chapter and currently manages their new Clinical Trial Transparency campaign. Last year, McGill’s chapter hosted the UAEM North American Conference, which Olivia helped coordinate. UAEM-McGill also successfully negotiated McGill’s support of their Global Access Licensing Framework. This year, Olivia is working with the McGill chapter, local Ethics Review Boards, and McGill’s student union to increase clinical trial reporting rates in the Montreal area. She coauthored “Clinical Trial Transparency” in the McGill Journal of Medicine this August and will be presenting the poster “The Role of Research Ethics Committees in the International Campaign for Clinical Trial Transparency” at McGill Global Health Night this November. Olivia is excited to learn more about the qualities that make a successful health advocate from the expert speakers and other participants. She hopes to deliver some of the workshop’s lessons to her UAEM chapter so that they can continue their campaigns informed, and with a sense of urgency.

Amanda Brumwell

Amanda Brumwell is the Global Program Officer at Advance Access & Delivery (AA&D), a Durham, NC-based global health nonprofit working to expand access to high-quality health care and medicines for vulnerable people. While at AA&D, Amanda has overseen grant-funded programs across South Africa, India, and Peru and supports the monitoring and evaluation for these sites participating in the Zero TB Initiative. Within these programs, she has developed screening and linkage to care resources for patients as part of AA&D’s tuberculosis (TB) and non-communicable disease programs in Durban, South Africa and Chennai, India. Amanda coordinates AA&D’s partnerships and research across academic institutions including Harvard University, Duke University, and UNC Chapel Hill, as well as with other global partners. She spearheaded AA&D’s initiative on access to healthcare and services among refugees in the Durham-Chapel Hill region and has developed a training handbook for community navigators who work to support refugee communities. Finally, Amanda is currently supporting AA&D’s foundational work to improve health systems and access to care along the

US-Mexico border for migrants and the communities that host them.
Prior to her work at AA&D, Amanda was a visiting fellow at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, where she conducted a study on treatment literacy for TB patients. Amanda graduated from Duke University where she studied biology, global health, and documentary studies. At Duke, she led AA&D’s review of global initiatives working to address inefficiencies in the supply, procurement, and delivery of second-line drugs for multidrug-resistant TB. Amanda is currently earning a Master of Applied Science in Population Health Management from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Brady Campbell

I am a fourth-year medical student who is currently pursuing an MPH degree. Part of my interest in pursuing an MPH was to better address the current gap that exists between clinical care, policy, and access to medications. I grew up and attended medical school in Iowa, where syringe service programs and other harm reduction measures are still illegal, which is what initially introduced me to advocacy and working for policy change. This advocacy is closely tied to work I’ve done with the local homeless community, advocating for medical access and medication access.

Norine Chan

Norine Chan is a first-year medical student at Duke University School of Medicine with an interest in integrating her future clinical career with work in public health and health policy. She is the current co-president of Duke Students for a National Health Program and is a member of the executive board of Duke Med for Social Justice. While an undergraduate at the City University of New York Hunter College, Norine served for two years on the leadership team of the health education non-profit organization Peer Health Exchange, which worked to provide a comprehensive health curriculum to students in New York City public high schools. She also volunteered in Weill Cornell Medicine’s Heart-to-Heart community outreach program for cardiovascular screenings and on a Global Brigades medical and public health brigade in Panama. Norine has worked as a medical scribe and volunteer at various New York City hospitals including New York-Presbyterian, Mount Sinai Hospital, and the Brooklyn Hospital Center.

Norine plans to pursue a specialty in emergency medicine or critical care surgery in an urban environment where she will be able to address social determinants of health through work in health policy and patient advocacy. She is especially excited to participate in this year’s Leaders Enabling Access to Pharmaceuticals (LEAP) workshop to better understand how innovations in health policy and technology can improve patients’ access to medicines and quality of life. Norine hopes to use the perspectives and knowledge she gains from the LEAP workshop to provide her future patients with more compassionate and equitable healthcare.

Ali Fakih

My name is Ali Fakih and I am a third-year student at Wayne State University (WSU) pursuing a degree in Public Health with a minor in Sociology. I was born and raised in Dearborn, Michigan, where I spent the majority of my life surrounded by other Arab Americans and first-generation students like myself. It was not until I stepped out of my community that I learned what Public Health truly entailed. My training through the Centers for Disease Control Undergraduate Public Health Scholars Program has helped me recognize the health disparities and stigmas associated with my community as well as how they manifest into poorer health outcomes and a diminished quality of life for many residents. My long-term career goals include pursuing an MD/MPH, where I will be able to work directly with patients while empowering and nurturing communities as a whole. I am particularly interested in conducting research pertaining to Middle Eastern and immigrant health and eventually translating my findings into community-based interventions and/or health policies.

I currently serve as a Member-At-Large Student Senator on WSU’s Student Senate where I lead the Middle Eastern/North African (ME/NA) project group initiative. Representation is crucial, and people who identify as Middle Eastern or North African often find themselves checking a box that they do not necessarily identify as. The goal of this project is to have a section for incoming students who identify as ME/NA to check so that they feel represented among the university student body. As a student senator, I have also worked to allocate over $5,000 to help fund the Psychology Clinic on campus and ensure free walk-ins, appointments, and diagnostic testing for my peers. I am extremely excited to have the opportunity to participate in the LEAP 2019 Workshop to further understand the ways in which medicine meets public health, how different social determinants of health affect access to medicine, gain advocacy tools and skills that will allow me to be a better advocate for my patients and community, and of course to meet other driven and passionate professionals and students in the field.

Tayyiaba Farooq

I’m a current junior at the University of Maryland, College Park pursuing a dual degree in Neurobiology and Physiology and Government and Politics. Over the past two years of my undergraduate career I have participated in the Global Public Health Scholars Program as well as the Federal Fellows Program concentrating in Public Health Policy. I have also previously interned at the International Rescue Committee where I was able to engage in the refugee resettlement process in Silver Spring, Maryland and bring awareness to the current issues surrounding immigration throughout the DC metro area. Additionally, this past summer I was an Access to Medicines intern at Public Citizen, where I was able to develop my advocacy skills and apply them to Access to Medicines work, patient safety and the Medicare For All Campaign.

In the future, I hope to pursue a career as a physician where I will be able combine my commitment for medicine with innovative policy solutions and public health intervention. Through this workshop, I hope to learn more about current health issues facing our current time and how to become a better advocate for health equity.

Ravi Gupta

Ravi Gupta is a third year internal medicine resident in the Urban Health Osler program at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He graduated from Yale School of Medicine and completed his undergraduate studies at The Ohio State University. He has an interest in FDA regulation and pharmaceutical policy. His research has focused on uncovering barriers in access to medications for patients, including generic availability and drug pricing. Ravi has worked as a Research Assistant for the MIT Jameel Poverty Action Lab in India on rigorous evaluations of health and education development programs. He has also worked with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation on designing and implementing state delivery and payment models. He is excited about attending the LEAP workshop to discuss with and learn from like minded peers and leaders working to improve patient access to medicines through lower prices.

Tania Hameed

My passion to serve underprivileged communities has driven my career and given me a diverse repertoire of service experience. I’ve developed population-health relevant skills through an internship with Legacy Community Health and utilized their resources to spearhead a HPV prevention, awareness, and vaccination program at the University of Houston. I lead Bonner WISE at the University of Houston to target disadvantaged student populations in the Houston area by not only developing supplementary lesson plans, but also motivating the middle school students to aspire for higher education. I’ve also served outside my home city through the CFHI program in Ghana, where I’ve worked hand-in-hand with the Planned Parenthood of Ghana, taught comprehensive sexual health education, and performed HIV counseling and testing. My experiences as an advocate in my role of co-chair of the American Medical Student Association’s Health Care for All campaign, and as an advocate for my father’s health needs has made me more determined than ever before to increase my knowledge in the area of access to medicines policy.

My experiences speak to my motivation to attend LEAP; I’m thoroughly invested in and determined to enable life-saving medications to be readily accessible to everyone. There’s so much more to learn, and so many different people and stories to learn from, and I firmly believe that collaboration is the key to accessible medicine.

I will be graduating from the University of Houston with a bachelor’s in Biology in May 2019, after which I will serve in Moldova with the Peace Corps. I hope to get my MD/MPH afterwards and continue my service in medicine.

Waqas Haque

Waqas Haque is a masters of public health student at Johns Hopkins University on leave from medical school at University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas, Texas. He has an economics background and pursued a master’s degree at the business school of Cambridge University in England before embarking on his medical studies. His primary involvement in advocacy has been through various Council positions in the Texas Medical Association, serving in areas such as healthcare quality and socioeconomics.

With an interest in helping expand access to medicines for underserved populations in the United States, Mr. Haque seeks to learn more about drug pricing and health technologies during the workshop. He is also involved in the Johns Hopkins Start-up Accelerator program for a mobile health imaging device and is an organizing intern for the Pakistani-American Political Action Committee. In his free time, Mr. Haque enjoys going to the gym, studying the Quran, and reading anything non-fiction.

Jad Hilal

Before becoming an MD candidate at the University of Pittsburgh, Jad Hilal earned a degree in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh with a concentration in International Relations and a focus on Middle-East politics. After undergraduate studies, Jad served as a Fellow with the Coro Fellowship in Public Affairs in Pittsburgh, performing neighborhood assistance and property value analysis for the Borough of Wilkinsburg and working for Health Monitoring Systems, a public health surveillance company covering many hospitals throughout much of the United States. He then authored a white paper regarding the state of Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome management from the perspectives of public health, public policy, and healthcare.

As a medical student, Jad practices social medicine through a few different foci. As a 2019 Social Medicine Fellow, he runs a lecture series “The Role of Cost in Healthcare” centered around protecting patients from malicious healthcare costs, especially regarding pharmaceuticals. He organizes the CATCH home visiting program to connect families in need with social resources available in the Pittsburgh area. Jad also serves as a coordinator for the Addiction Medicine interest group and area of academic concentration, providing opportunities for medical students to teach community members about Narcan administration, to observe AA/NA meetings, and to speak to local high schools about harmful substance use. His research interest is also centered around addiction medicine, through his projects A National Study of the Association between State Child Policies and Infant Mortality, and Education for the Reduction of Stigma on Academic Medical Centers. Volunteerism, the cornerstone of any medical education, is practiced by Jad regularly at the Birmingham Free Clinic, and at Prevention Point Pittsburgh, a local harm reduction clinic.

Avanthi Jayaweera

Avanthi Jayaweera is a fourth-year medical student at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) School of Medicine and serves as the Vice President for Leadership Development on the Board of Trustees for the American Medical Student Association (AMSA). Prior to this role, she served as the 2018 AMSA Education and Advocacy Fellow where she worked closely with AMSA’s National Leaders on major educational programming and advocacy campaigns related to gun violence prevention, civic engagement, access to medicines, and affordable healthcare. As the AMA Fellow, she traveled to multiple medical schools to host advocacy skills workshops to train students on how to be effective advocates for patients. She also organized AMSA’s Advocacy Leadership Summit to engage students in initiatives related to lowering drug prices and addressing the alarming influence of the pharmaceutical industry on medical education and public policy. As a medical student at VCU, she is currently designing an advocacy and leadership curriculum to prepare medical trainees to face and challenge systemic barriers to health as future physician leaders.

Bonolo Mathekga

I am currently pursuing a masters degree in Bioengineering, Innovation and Design at Johns Hopkins University. I have first-hand experience recognizing clinical needs in an emerging global health markets (South Africa and Brazil), and plan to develop biomedical technologies that specifically cater to the global health sector. My work focuses on improving the sensitivity of Tuberculosis (TB) diagnostic tests, and in doing so increasing access to drug susceptibility testing in resource-constrained settings. I am looking forward to participating in the LEAP workshop and hope to learn more about how decisions pertaining to drug pricing and access to medicines are made.

Keanan McGonigle

Keanan McGonigle is the 2019-2020 Education and Advocacy Fellow (EAF) at the American Medical Student Association (AMSA). He is a 2019 graduate of Tulane University School of Medicine and plans to complete an internal medicine residency and practice primary care. Before medical school he received his B.A. in Human Biology and Master of Public Policy from the University of Virginia. His Master’s thesis focused on the impact of the Affordable Care Act on the health of people living with HIV in Virginia. In medical school Keanan directed a student-run HIV and Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) testing program active in sites all across New Orleans. As AMSA’s EAF, Keanan engages medical students and partner organizations in campaigns to advance health justice, increase healthcare access, and reform medical education.

Julian Narvaez

I have worked primarily on access to medicine through the lens of medical devices. Through this past year, over $170,000 in medical device volume has been repaired, tested, packaged, and sent to various under resourced clinics seeking to develop their clinical infrastructure. This has been made possible through collaboration with the local non-profit, MedWish International. My work has consisted of developing partnerships with other student groups, establishing an asset management system, and deep-diving into the devices themselves. In addition, I have spent the past few years working in a medical robotics research lab developing a magnetically actuated catheter for usage inside an MRI. I have since transitioned into employment at a design consulting company assisting other companies prototype and manufacture their ideas. Developing a strong electrical engineering background through these experiences has proved invaluable in differentiating between technological and political barriers to access.

Exploring the legal and framework preventing medical devices from being widely distributed is my primary motivation for attending. The FDA approval process has remained a black box and opening it up with the guidance of my fellow peers and professional staff would be excellent. Taking the lessons learned in advocacy and legal processes back to my work with medical devices would open doors in making devices more accessible.

Angela Pérez

Subsequent to my work in the Ministry, I was awarded a Colciencias scholarship by the Colombian government to conduct research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. My specific project involved the evaluation of a centralized drug purchasing policy for the treatment of Hepatitis C. I was lucky to be able to have Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, the Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, who happened to be working on a similar policy in Louisiana, as a mentor. While at Johns Hopkins, I took classes that helped to strengthen and deepen my understanding of health care systems, pharmacoepidemiology, and health care economics. Based upon these studies, I feel it is absolutely essential to design a participatory model for the Colombian health care system. This would help to prioritize technologies paid for with public money, identify negotiation and purchasing mechanisms to improve access to all citizens, and develop a governance process.

In summary, the depth and breadth of my work experience, combined with my studies in public health, epidemiology, and public policy and health management, is a winning formula. This will provide me with the tools, access to case studies, and the opportunity to engage in comprehensive research in areas directly relevant to Colombia. We need to create policies to improve the efficiency, transparency, and participation of all of the stakeholders in the health care system. These include the community as whole and individual patients. I have significant experience working with the key players in Colombia

Meril Pothen

Meril is a Master of Public Policy Candidate and Margolis Scholar in Health Policy and Management at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy. Her policy area is payment reform, particularly around value-based insurance design, value-based payment models, and social determinants of health financing strategies. As a graduate student researcher, she’s investigated early successes and implementation challenges of outcomes-based contracts and subscription models for prescription drugs. She is currently the Health Policy and Community Engagement team lead for a partnership between Duke and a local federally-qualified health center to improve social determinants of health referrals and an ACA Open Enrollment 2019 Volunteer Navigator. Before Duke, she spent five years in healthcare consulting, supporting clients in pharma market research, hospital patient experience, and revenue cycle management.

Gayatri Sanku

I am a 2nd year PhD student in the Georgetown-National Institute of Health Graduate Partnership Program conducting my thesis research under Dr. Thomas Nutman in the Helminth Immunology Section. Previously, I completed my MPH in Epidemiology with concentrations in pharmacoepidemiology and global health, and BS in Neuroscience at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Through global and domestic opportunities, I have been actively learning and contributing to science policy efforts for 3 years. During my internship at the Food and Drug Agency’s National Center for Toxicology Research(NCTR) studying C. jejuni resistance, I contributed to a whitepaper on funding for AMR funding at the Global Regulatory Sciences Conference in Brasilia, Brazil in 2017. I was selected as a David L. Boren Fellow on behalf of the National Security Education Program and the US State Department to study public health biodefense policy and the Zika virus in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Last year, as part of one of the ReACT-WHO AMR Challenge winning teams, I presented our proposal to combat ESKAPE pathogens to antimicrobial resistance experts from the WHO in Geneva, Switzerland. In the future, I aim to become a physician scientist through the NIH Track 3 Medical Scientist Training Program. As a physician scientist, I expect to work closely at the interface between patient care, lab science and access to medicines to enable higher quality and equitable care for patients. Through the LEAP workshop, I hope to learn the impact that physicians and scientists may have in policy and achieving parity in access to medicines.