#  Working in Global Health: A Virtual Panel  

 





April 22, 2020

 

 

One of the main takeaways from Faculty Director Sue J. Goldie’s Harvard College course about global health? That what we know as “global health” encompasses multiple disciplines, complex challenges, and diverse responses.

In mid-April, the Incubator held a virtual open house and panel discussion to help students explore this breadth. The panel included Ben Bigelow, Technical Account Manager at Hospital IQ, and Erica Berlin, Epidemiologist at the Clinton Health Access Initiative—both graduates of the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Prior to graduate school at Harvard, Ben studied math at the University of California, Davis. During graduate school, his work focused on hospital operations in Ethiopia and policy research in Massachusetts. Currently, Ben works at Hospital IQ—a software company that provides an operations management platform for hospitals—where he manages projects and relationships with hospital IT teams to integrate their data feeds into their platform.

Erica’s entry point to global health was as a Community Health Education Volunteer in the Peace Corps in Senegal, where she extended her service for a third year to act as a Technical Advisor to PATH's Malaria Elimination Partnership in Africa (MACEPA) program. After finishing her master's she joined the Clinton Health Access Initiative as an Epidemiologist for the Botswana Country Team and transitioned to the Global Malaria Team in mid-2019. Currently she is based in Gaborone, Botswana and closely supports Ministries of Health in Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe to develop evidenced based malaria strategies, identify drivers of malaria transmission and evaluate efficacy of key interventions.

Students had some fantastic questions to engage the speakers both collectively and individually, both about working in global health and specific skills. In the dynamic back-and-forth during the session, both panelists focused on the roles of data literacy in public health, emphasized the importance of prioritizing wellbeing in school, and reflected on the implications of the COVID-19 crisis on their respective sectors.

“We all graduated from the same program at the Harvard Chan School,” said Nina Bhattacharya, GHELI’s Instructional Design Specialist and the panel’s moderator, “and yet we now represent completely different fields—epidemiology, health IT, education. There is tremendous diversity when comes to working in global health.”



 

 

 



 

 

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