Faculty with Global Health Experience M-R

Dr. Mangili is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Department of Medicine, Division of Geographic Medicine and Infectious Diseases. She has assisted in the initiation of a multinational international study assessing nutrition in HIV-infected drug users and traveled to South India to set up initial phase of protocol. She has also worked with indigenous population in Bolivia and learned about the various manifestations of Chagas disease. Her current interests are in CV risk assessment and cardio-and nutrigenomic analysis of HIV-infected patients in resource-limited countries. She is funded by a K23 award from NIAID to pursue these interests.

John Morgan currently serves as director of the Tufts Dental Facility Serving Persons with Special Needs (TDF). He has an extensive career in dental service projects abroad, in collaboration with Feed the Children (Haiti, 1990), Honduras (Medical, Eye and Dental International Care Association, 1991-2) and the University of Maryland (Dominican Republic, 1993). He has also worked in Mongolia and Nepal, where, in collaboration with the Himalayan Dental Relief Project, Dr. Morgan provided dental care in orphanages and a Buddhist monastery.

Dr. Morgan is currently working on a comprehensive public health project in Zambia. While the main focus of the project, named "Options for Children in Zambia," is on dental care, it has been expanded to include health promotion and prevention programs and micro-finance loans in order to build community productivity and sustainability. Dr. Morgan and his colleagues also have instituted a sample survey of the population including measures of incidence of active and chronic diseases, allowing dentists to create tiers of priority for treatment, assess resources, etc. The project also includes training of health care workers in dental prevention, in order to increase the sustainability and long-lasting effects of the project.

Dr. Morgan has worked with UMass Medical Students in Zambia, and believes their collaboration would be a good model for working with MPH students (ALE opportunity). Also, he has worked with public health officials in Zambia, who he believes would be willing to help coordinate public health students working on the project.

Dr. Elena Naumova is a Professor of Public Health and Community Medicine in the School of Medicine. Her area of expertise is in methodology development for statistical mathematical modeling of transient processes with application in epidemiology and public health. Currently, she is interested in modeling infectious diseases and developing analytical tools for analysis of seasonality in time-series data. She is the Director of the Tufts Initiative for the Forecasting and Modeling of Infectious Diseases (InForMID) established to conduct research and provide a venue for training in the fields of computational epidemiology, conservation medicine, biostatistics, and bioinformatics with the emphasis on public health applications. Over the last 15 years, Dr. Naumova has participated in a number of international projects collaborating with mathematicians, epidemiologists, immunologists, and public health professionals in Kenya, Ecuador, Japan, Canada, UK, and Russia. She continues working with the leading Russian and Canadian researchers in the field of data modeling and statistical data analysis. She has a strong record of successful funding by federal agencies nationally and internationally.

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Jeanne Penvenne is Associate Professor of History in the School of Arts and Sciences, and former head of the Africa Forum. Her area of specialty is urban and labor history in Mozambique. Dr. Penvenne uses archival resources, literature, language and oral history to better understand the life of ordinary Mozambicans in the colonial period. Recent projects have included a book on colonial racism using the oral history of colonial workers and a new book "Seeking Gendered Perspectives" on women's experiences in Mozambique, of which health plays a significant component in making labor choices.

Dr. Penvenne teaches two courses that would be especially relevant for public health students interested in African history. "Race, Class, and Power in Southern Africa" (History 150) is a course on social and labor history in the region, including a unit on HIV/AIDS and local social strategies to protect health. "From Liberation to Humanitarian Assistance" (History 152), focusing on Angola and Mozambique considers race-differentiated health policies during the colonial era, as well as spirit possession and innovative approaches to healing in the wake of the civil wars in both countries.

Dr. Rogers has extensive international experience, with approximately 2/3 of her work focused on areas outside the U.S., including Latin America, francophone Africa and Asia. Current projects include "hunger mapping" in Panama and Ecuador, using small area estimation. The goal of the project is to use DHS and census data in order to develop a predictive algorithm for malnutrition; the estimates will later be used for advocacy of nutrition and health policy, and program design (funded by the World Food Program). Dr. Rogers is also pursuing a proposal with INCAP to extend the hunger mapping project to Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

Dr. Rogers' other major projects involve an assessment of the school feeding program in Honduras, and the development of a 2 week long intensive course for mid-career professionals on nutrition monitoring and evaluation and food policy in Guatemala (also with INCAP).

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Dr. Rosenberg is Professor of Occupational and Environmental Health in the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine, and concentration leader of the MPH Environmental Health program. Her course on Occupational and Environmental Health, a core requirement for the concentration, uses other countries as a point of comparison to the United States throughout the course.

Her main research interests are the comparative study of occupational and environmental health policy and practice, chemical regulation policy, sustainable production and the obstacles to companies transitioning to clean production, and most recently, issues around the clean up of nuclear hazardous waste sites, which highlights what happens in the absence of sustainable production. With a background in anthropology and political economy, Dr. Rosenberg brings a unique perspective to the study of health, organizational culture and the work environment.

Dr. Rosenberg has recently worked on a research project in China, studying the health and safety systems of footwear factories. Other regions of interest include Eastern Europe (Hungary) where she has worked to promote occupational health via labor unions, development of NGOs and democracy building in the region. She is currently looking at the health and safety systems in former nuclear weapons manufacturing sites, where the problem is not so much a technical one but a social one - how does one design a safety system in a workplace culture of secrecy and distrust? This project is in the US but may expand to Europe and the former Soviet Union. She is also developing an MS/MPH dual degree with the Tufts University School of Engineering.

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Dr. Robert Russell is Professor of Medicine at Tufts Medical School, the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, and the Director and Senior Scientist at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging. Dr. Russell has worked on nutrition assessment projects internationally in Iran, Vietnam and Iraq. He has also conducted projects on Vitamin A and Vitamin A value in plant-based diets in the Philippines, China and Korea. Although research at the HNRC, funded principally by the USDA, is directed towards domestic nutrition concerns, the Center does use international sites to conduct research applicable to the U.S., as well as to study the role of nutrition in infectious diseases.

More information on the HNRCA may be found at: http://www.hnrc.tufts.edu

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