DrPH Student Directory

Juan Carlos Bordes

Juan Carlos Bordes (he/him) is a third year DrPH student. His background as a clinician in the field of occupational therapy has led him to work in a variety of healthcare settings including nursing homes, acute rehabilitation hospitals, and inpatient hospitals. Being an occupational therapist has given Juan Carlos the opportunity to engage with individuals navigating the healthcare system, their support systems, the multiple team members involved in patient care, and collaborate with hospitals and healthcare professional organizations on DEI efforts. These experiences provided a foundation which led Juan Carlos to seek to make an impact through public health. Some of Juan Carlos’ goals during the DrPH program are to promote health equity and anti-racism within healthcare, with a particular interest on the impact of optimally addressing the emotional health of healthcare workers. In his spare time, he enjoys spending time with his niece and nephews, going on long walks, mindfulness activities, and watching Drag Race, Star Wars, among others.

Brittany Campbell

Brittany Campbell is a third-year DrPH student bringing 7 years of experience working on projects that center cancer health equity and community engagement at the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations and the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. Prior to attending UC Berkeley, she was awarded a NCI Diversity Supplement to understand patients’ experience navigating care following a positive genetic test result in the safety-net setting. This project led to her current research interests at the intersection of cancer survivorship, mind-body wellbeing, and healing from racial trauma. She received her Master of Public Health from Saint Louis University and Bachelor of Arts in International Studies from the University of Missouri. She is a proud St. Louis, Missouri native who enjoys music, dancing, and bringing people together in the spirit of healing and connection.

Purba Chatterjee

Purba Chatterjee is a third year Dr PH student. Purba grew up in India; her formative years were spent in Chennai and Kolkata. Purba came to the US to pursue her undergraduate studies. She has a Bachelor’s in Economics from University of California Los Angeles and a Master’s in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Purba has over 15 years of public health program management experience. She has worked on HIV/AIDS and other non-communicable diseases projects in Uganda, India, and now Kenya. After completion of the DrPH program, Purba plans to pivot to global mental health research with a focus on the impact of stigma on access to mental health care in low and middle-income countries. She is passionate about partnering with the community to build capacity, address stigma, and increase access to treatment for common mental health disorders. In her current role as the Associate Director of Global Equity, UCSF Dept. of Ob/Gyn, Bixby Center, she oversees operations and administration for HIV/AIDS affiliated research studies in Western Kenya and co-leads global health equity initiatives. Aside from work, Purba enjoys going on long hikes with her husband, daughter, and son. She is also an avid traveler, loves to cook, and enjoys practicing yoga!

Renee Clarke

Renee Clarke is a third year DrPH candidate with over 10 years of experience in the healthcare industry. Renee completed her Master of Public Health in Maternal and Child Health at the University of South Florida and holds two bachelor’s degrees in nursing and health sciences. Prior to University of California, Berkeley, she served in a variety of clinical settings including Emergency Management, Neonatal Intensive Care, Women’s Health as a Registered Nurse. Her passion has always been service leadership and eliminating health disparity gaps among women, infants, and children. Renee’s interest in improving health outcomes extends nationally and internationally. She has served in places such as Niger (Africa), Milot, Haiti and St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. Quality improvement, evaluation, implementation and decreasing health disparities has always been a cornerstone of her experiences. Renee was born in the twin island of Trinidad and Tobago and enjoys traveling, learning new cultures, outdoor activities and spending time with friends and family.

Yao Doe

Yao Doe joins the DrPH program from fall 2021 at UC Berkeley. He was born and raised in Ghana. He Attended Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana where he completed his BSc. Chemistry. Upon completion, he worked as a laboratory chemist for a year and then moved to medical school in Ukraine. After graduating from medical school, he did his residency in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology in Kyiv, Ukraine. Following the completion of his residency, he returned home where he worked as head of the OB/GYN department of a hospital in Ghana and a medical director of a hospital in Togo.

Besides working as a medical doctor, he took active roles in community outreach programs such as screening for breast and cervical cancer, HIV prevention, vaccination programs, chronic-care home visits in underserved communities, and vesicovaginal and rectovaginal fistula repair in sub-regions of Ghana.He also introduced an innovative program that employed the use of prophylactic misoprostol (an inexpensive and easy to use medication that needs no refrigeration) for postpartum hemorrhage and he provided training for midwives and nursing assistants in various regions in rural Togo and this led to drastic reductions in postpartum hemorrhage and subsequent reductions in the evidence of maternal mortality and hospital referral rate in rural areas of Togo. Being thirsty for more knowledge, he moved to the United States to further his studies in Public Health at the University of New Haven, where he obtained his degree in Master of Public Health.

Yao’s primary interest is in maternal and child health, especially the prevention of maternal morbidity and mortality in developing countries. He likes playing soccer, going on road trips, and listening to classic country music.

Blake Erhardt-Ohren

Blake Erhardt-Ohren is a third year DrPH student. She is passionate about improved access to sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services, particularly abortion services, for forcibly displaced and immigrant populations. Prior to joining the program, she spent three years at Pathfinder International, where she provided monitoring and evaluation support to SRH projects around the world. During her master’s program, she worked at CARE USA, assisting with the Supporting Access to Family Planning and Post-Abortion Care (SAFPAC) project in emergency settings. She holds a BA in History from UC San Diego and an MPH in Global Health from Emory University. In her free time, Blake enjoys hiking with her partner and two dogs, birdwatching, and traveling.

Olufunke Fasawe

Olufunke Fasawe is a 3rd year DrPH candidate from Nigeria. She joined the program from the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) where she worked as a Senior Director, Primary Health Care (Global), Director of Programs (Nigeria) and Technical Lead for the Sexual, Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn and Child Health Program (Nigeria). She has over ten years’ experience in global health working on program design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation cutting across HIV/AIDS, Routine Immunization, Sexual and Reproductive Health, Maternal and newborn health, Cervical Cancer, and health systems strengthening. Prior to starting her career with CHAI, she worked with the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS in Geneva as a health economics consultant conducting economic modeling for HIV programs and. She also interned at the World Health Organization Headquarters in Geneva during her Masters program. Olufunke holds a Master’s degree in International Health Management, Economics and Policy from SDA Bocconi, Milan, Italy; she earned her Bachelor of Dental Surgery degree from the University of Lagos, Nigeria. She loves to play tennis and enjoys running outdoors. She is passionate about gender equity and promotion of universal health care in developing countries.

Bhavya Joshi

Bhavya Joshi, joins the DrPH in the fall of 2021. As a Global Public Health Fellow, Bixby Summer 2022 Fellow, and the Human Rights Center Fellow 2022, Bhavya’s research focuses on understanding reproductive needs of marginalized populations in countries affected by crises. As a women human rights advocate and educator, Bhavya supports women rights defenders from across the globe to build their capacity to use international human rights mechanisms for advocacy and activism at national, regional, and international levels. Before joining the program, she managed, implemented, and evaluated public health projects in South Asia for more than 5 years. Within India, she has worked in 18 out of 28 states. Bhavya received her MA in International Law and Human Rights from the United Nations mandated University for Peace, Costa Rica and is finishing her second MA in Peace, Security, Development and International Conflict Transformation from University of Innsbruck, Austria. Her bachelor is in Political Science from Delhi University, India. She is a travel enthusiast and is fond of outdoor sports, drinking coffee and experimenting with cuisines.

Silvana Larrea

Silvana Larrea is a third-year DrPH candidate at UC Berkeley. She is a Medical Doctor from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and received her MPH in Epidemiology from the National Institute of Public Health (INSP) in Mexico. Prior to starting her graduate program in UC Berkeley, she was a Program Officer for the Poverty, Gender, and Youth department in the Population Council Mexico office. In the Population Council, she provided technical support for the Council’s research portfolio: design, implementation and evaluation of interventions and developing new proposals, IRB protocols, briefs, donor reports, and manuscripts. She is also co-investigator in diverse research projects related to migration and health, with a focus in sexual and reproductive health. Her research interests include sexual and reproductive health, migration and health, and inequalities in health. Her dissertation research focuses on challenges and opportunities of accessing and using sexual and reproductive health services for in-transit migrant women in Mexico.

Solange Madriz

Solange Madriz, MA, MS is a second-year doctoral student as well as an Academic Coordinator at the Institute of Global Health Sciences at University of California, San Francisco. She has designed, implemented and monitored global health programs in diverse settings including Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Paraguay, India and the United States. Her research focuses on global health and professional development of health professionals in low-resource settings. In addition to her research activities, Ms. Madriz teaches graduate level courses on global health for public health practitioners and medical providers. From 2015 to 2018, Ms. Madriz led the implementation of a maternal and newborn health quality improvement project in all the secondary health facilities of the states of Huehuetenango and Alta Verapaz, Guatemala. During the COVID-19 pandemic Ms. Madriz led the educational program to train over 100 community-based organization members as case investigators and contact tracers working for the San Francisco and California Departments of Public Health. She lives with her husband and 2-year old daughter in the Mission District of San Francisco. Ms. Madriz obtained her undergraduate degree from the Central University of Venezuela and a MA in International Studies from the University of San Francisco followed by a MS in Global Health from the University of California, San Francisco.

Wan Nurul Naszeerah

Lt. Wan Nurul Naszeerah (she/her) is a third-year Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) student with Designated Emphases in New Media (Berkeley Center for New Media) and Development Engineering (Blum Center for Developing Economies) at the University of California-Berkeley. As a Digital Transformation of Development (DToD) Fellow, Wan is passionate in enhancing public health preparedness through infoveillance and infodemic management in Southeast Asia. Born and raised in Brunei, Wan is currently developing a human-centered digital intervention against vaccine misinformation for the Malay-speaking communities in Southeast Asia.

This professional endeavor stems from her personal experience as a native speaker of the Malay language, for which social media technologies have not been equitably developed to moderate the spread of vaccine misinformation and to sufficiently address the emerging issues of vaccine hesitancy in this region. Hence, she has been collaborating with data scientists as well as developing her computational skills, specifically in Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing, both of which are increasingly integrated into today’s public health preparedness and research. She believes that global health equity can only be achieved when there is equity in public health technologies.

Prior to becoming a Cal student, Wan had served as an infantry-trained military officer in Brunei, where she was involved in training, operations, research, and communications in the context of military medicine and health. In 2015, Wan had also graduated from the Yale School of Public Health, where she was trained in infectious diseases epidemiology and global health as Yale’s Global Health Research Fellow. She identifies as a first-generation graduate in her Malay family. She currently lives in the Bay Area with her supportive husband and sweet toddler.

Nadia Anahi Rojas

Nadia Anahi Rojas is a third-year DrPH student and a proud Bay Area native. She received her MPH from UC Davis and BA from UC Berkeley with a double major in Ethnic Studies and Integrative Biology. Before attending the DrPH program, Nadia worked at ChangeLab Solutions, a national nonprofit in Oakland, CA, where she developed tools and resources for community-based organizations, policymakers, and public officials across subject matters on upstream policy interventions. Nadia also worked at the School of Public Health at Berkeley, where she led the data collection and management of various projects evaluating Berkeley’s soda tax. Nadia is a DACA recipient and a strong advocate for the undocumented community. She co-founded Graduates Reaching a Dream Deferred Northern California (GRADD NorCal), where she was instrumental in organizing conferences throughout California for undocumented youth interested in attending graduate school. Nadia is currently focused on advancing research on the Latine population and aging. Her additional interests include research that will reduce health disparities and promote equity among communities that have been marginalized, including the undocumented population. Nadia enjoys eating lots of raw vegetables and loves salsa and bachata dancing.

Ida Wilson

Ida Wilson is an Oakland native and third year DrPH candidate. She received a Master of Arts in Applied Anthropology from San José State University and a Bachelor of Science in Anthropology from UC Riverside. Ida has served as a Project Manager for the Center for Critical Public Health at the Institute for Scientific Analysis for several NIH- and Tobacco Related Disease Research Program-funded projects that investigated substance use among young adults in the Bay Area and in rural counties in Northern California. In addition to her duties as Project Manager, she also served as the Coordinator for the Center’s Internship program. Ida’s current research focuses on framing police violence as a public health issue by examining the experiences of Black and Latina women. Her additional research interests include health inequities, as well as the use of critical perspectives in examining public health issues by exploring the ways in which socio-structural systems contribute to health inequities for marginalized populations.

Emily Winer

Emily Winer (she/her) is a third year DrPH student. Emily’s doctoral research is focused on the use of participatory, arts-based research methods with youth, as well as youth mental health and wellbeing. Before coming to UC Berkeley, Emily worked at the International WELL Building Institute as one of the developers for WELL, a global certification for advancing health and wellbeing in buildings and communities. Emily’s work focused on the promotion of mental health through design and policy strategies at the building, organizational, and urban scale. Emily holds a BA in Psychology from Carleton College and an MPH from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Outside of the DrPH program, Emily enjoys baking, ceramics, yoga, and spending time outdoors.

Amanda Marr Chung

Amanda Marr Chung is a 4th year DrPH candidate. Her current research focuses on the integration and sustainability of vertical health programs. Most recently, she was the UCSF Project Director and PI for an HIV grant to support the Zimbabwe Ministry of Health and Child Care in transforming the Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision program into an integrated, sustainable program that is government led and owned. Amanda is also an Evaluation Specialist for the UCSF Malaria Elimination Initiative and is currently working with the Thailand malaria program. She received her Master’s degree in Community Oriented Public Health Practice from the University of Washington and her AB in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University. She has over 15 years of experience in global health in the areas of program management, leadership development, and monitoring and evaluation for HIV, eye health, immunizations, maternal, newborn, and child health, and malaria. She is passionate about frontline delivery channels, community interventions, and capacity strengthening and has a keen interest in women’s health. Aside from work, she loves to cook, bake, travel, and pursue many outdoor activities, including running, cycling, backpacking, and alpine skiing. She also dabbled in ice climbing with her partner and is looking forward to the day when they can go with their two sons.

Amanda Mazur

Amanda Mazur is a fourth-year DrPH student at UC Berkeley. She received her MS in Global Health Sciences from UCSF and a BS in Biological Science and BA in International Relations from the University of Calgary. Before attending UC Berkeley, Amanda worked at UCSF on projects in adolescent sexual and reproductive health and coordinated international behavioral health research projects focusing on HIV adherence and stigma reduction, detection and treatment of common mental disorders in community rural health clinics, and understanding intersectional stigma related to HIV and cancer. Prior to starting graduate studies, she worked with the United Nations Development Programme in Zimbabwe to accelerate achievement on the UN Millennium Development Goals. Her research interests include global mental health, sexual and reproductive health, and understanding how systems level approaches can address health outcomes in low-resource settings.

Betsy Pleasants

Betsy Pleasants is a fourth year DrPH candidate. She received her Master’s in Public Health in the Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Health (MCAH) program at UC Berkeley in the Spring of 2019. She currently works with the Wallace Center for MCAH Research, the Bixby Center for Population, Health, and Sustainability, and the Fung Fellowship (School of Engineering, UC Berkeley). She is interested in mixed methods approaches to researching and intervening upon sexual and reproductive health issues, particularly in access to reproductive health information and services. She is an Emerging Scholar in the Society of Family Planning’s 2022 cohort, working on her dissertation Understanding r/abortion:
A mixed methods study of a Reddit-based online community for abortion in 2022.

Chris Rubeo

Chris Rubeo is a third-year doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley in the Doctor of Public Health program. His work has primarily focused on designing programs that enable healthcare providers to meet their patients’ basic needs like nutritious food, affordable transportation, and quality housing. As a researcher at the Center for Care Innovations, he uses human-centered design and quality improvement methods to provide technical assistance to healthcare organizations across California. He is an avid cook, loves to rock climb, and continues to pursue his own musical projects.

Ifunanya Dibiaezue

Ifunanya Dibiaezue is a fourth year DrPH student. She is a Public Health Professional with over 7 years of experience in maternal and child health, communicable and non-communicable disease prevention, nutritional awareness and training programs, and public health policy development. She holds a Bsc degree in Biomedicine from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, and a Master of Public Health (MPH) from the University of York, York, UK. While working as an Assistant Program Officer in Africare under the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves Project, Ifunanya helped increase the earning capacity of over 1000 women cooks, reduce indoor air pollution and reduce the incidence of respiratory diseases by 65% in Lagos State, Nigeria. In addition, she has helped improve the health of people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) in Southern Nigeria. She has coordinated over 25 HIV testing and counseling programs, and training campaigns with over 70 clinical staff to improve the overall quality of care for PLWHA. She is also very passionate about promoting healthy lifestyles among women. She is the founder of ActivEaters, an organization that focuses on improving the quality of health of women through diet, exercise, and behavior change.

Julia Ryan

Julia Ryan joins the DrPH program with a passion for improving sexual and reproductive health in vulnerable communities globally. Over the past seven years, she has worked on a broad range of quantitative and qualitative research projects at academic institutions, non-profit organizations, and governmental agencies. Most recently, she spent three years as a qualitative research coordinator focused on HIV prevention in sub-Saharan Africa with the Women’s Global Health Imperative at RTI International. Prior to that, she worked on reproductive health research with UNC Project in Malawi, vertical HIV transmission with USAID, Ebola response with the WHO, and Zika response with the CDC. Julia received her BA in Health and Societies with a concentration in Public Health at the University of Pennsylvania, and her MSc in Reproductive and Sexual Health Research from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). She grew up in Boston and Philadelphia and loves running, reading, and snowboarding.

Mikail Aliyu

Mikail Aliyu is a fourth-year DrPH student at UC Berkeley. He graduated from the University of Lagos, Nigeria with a degree in pharmacology. He started his career in the pharma industry working with Sanofi, where he focused on increasing access to essential medicines at primary health care level in anglophone West and East African countries. Mikail later received his MPH from the University of Leeds, in the UK, and moved into management consulting as a Program Officer at The Palladium Group. Before UC, Mikail managed a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded investment called the Technical Support Unit (TSU) project. Through this grant, he provided technical support to the Federal Ministry of Health in Nigeria to create an enabling environment for women and girls to access better reproductive health and family planning (RH/FP) services. He worked closely with government officials and decision-makers to facilitate the creation of enabling structures and processes for accountability, priority setting, and coordination of RH/FP services—this involved strategy design, policy development, and implementation. Notably, he supported the development and execution of the Nigerian Family Planning Blueprint. Mikail is passionate about reducing barriers and addressing sociocultural norms that hinder access to reproductive, maternal, child and adolescent health, and nutrition using system thinking and context-based approaches. In his spare time, he enjoys traveling, sports and trying new food.

Sai Ramya Maddali

Sai Ramya Maddali is a fourth-year doctoral candidate. She has received her MPH in Epidemiology from Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health and BS in Biology from UC Riverside. Her research interests include the multi-level determinants of racial/ethnic health inequities over the lifecourse, neighborhood health effects, theories in Social Epidemiology, and mixed methods research. Sai is a part of the Policies and Life-course approaches to Achieve Community Equity (PLACE) research group at UC Berkeley. Prior to joining the DrPH program, Sai was the Senior Research Associate at Upstream USA and supported the development and evaluation of Upstream’s contraceptive care initiatives in Delaware, Massachusetts, Washington, North Carolina, and Rhode Island. Additionally, Sai also supported UCSF’s Sustainable East Africa Research in Community Health (SEARCH) universal test and treat program in Kenya and Uganda as a Research Analyst. In Sai Ramya’s personal life, she is an avid backpacker, rock climber, and baker and can be found wandering the Californian coast with her spouse and dog.

Samanta Anríquez

Samanta Anríquez (she/her/hers) is a fourth-year DrPH student, who came sponsored by the Fulbright commission in Chile (2020-2021). She served in Chilean public health services for 6 years, focusing in Primary Care and Family Practice in extreme zones, where she has been the director of a family health center in the Chilean Patagonia. She has a medical specialization in Public Health and a MSc of Epidemiology, both from the Universidad Católica of Chile, where she focused her research on Chronic Multimorbidity and Primary Care Models. She has advocated for Health and Human Rights as a volunteer in Amnesty International while being a medical student at the Universidad of Chile and later worked with Medical Residents Union in Chile. She is currently a fellow at the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center, where her work with Amnesty International Chile focuses on the reparation of Human Rights violations in the Chilean social outbreak in October 2019. She is the mother of two beautiful girls who joined her, and her husband in this adventure.

Auwal A.A. Abubakar

Auwal Abubakar joins the DrPH program in fall 2019. Prior to joining UC Berkeley, he worked for Bauchi State Government in Nigeria as the Incident Manager of the Polio Emergency Operations Center (EOC). At this coordinating center, he was responsible for oversight and managed the state’s Polio Eradication Initiatives (PEI) and Routine Immunization (RI) programs. He also participated in the coordination of the Primary Health Care Systems Strengthening program.

He received his undergraduate degree in Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) from University of Maiduguri in Nigeria, and postgraduate degree in M.Sc. Epidemiology and Biostatistics from SRM Institute of Science and Technology in India.

He began his career as a physician providing clinical care and management of HIV/AIDs clients in a tertiary health hospital in Bauchi State Nigeria. During the one year period on this program, he experienced first-hand the limitations and inadequacy of the Nigerian health sector, which oftentimes left him feeling helpless. Most painful to him were the needless cases of children and women who lost their lives due to poor access to life-saving medical interventions and preventive medical services in their communities. He realized quickly that if impact was to be made at scale, he would need to venture into public health and contribute to resource mobilization, program management and health systems strengthening.

Auwal’s primary interest is in the area of HIV/AIDs, Maternal, Neonatal, and Child Health (MNCH). He loves music, traveling, reading, networking, and watching movies.

Andrea Jacobo

Andrea Jacobo is a third-year DrPH student at UC Berkeley. She received her Masters of Public Health from The University of Memphis and Bachelors of Science in Exercise Physiology from the University of Miami. Prior to her attending UC Berkeley, Andrea implemented various evidence-based nutrition and physical activity programs in community settings and serving youth to older adults. Along with program implementation, Andrea co-facilitated a community of practice focused on addressing the root causes of health disparities in Memphis through policy, systems, and environment. Andrea’s areas of interest are addressing health inequities through community-centered, people-centered approaches including human-centered design thinking as a tool for community organization and capacity building. She has a passion for community health, culture & arts, and food. In her spare time, Andrea loves to work out and teach group fitness classes to help promote wellness and write poetry to catalyze social change!

Alma Juarez-Armenta

Alma Juarez-Armenta is a third-year DrPH student at UC Berkeley. She received her Masters of Public Policy from The University of Chicago and her Bachelors of Arts in Economics and Political Science from the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM). Before attending UC Berkeley, Alma was awarded a Metcalf Fellowship at the Center for Global Health at UChicago, where she performed cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis for different solutions to alleviate the arsenic poisoning problem in Bangladesh. For the last year, she worked as an advisor to the Health Minister in Mexico, studying the negative effects of conditional cash transfers on the population’s health. Her research interests include quantitative methods and evaluation of public health policies. During her DrPH, Alma hopes to further analyze and develop public policies regarding gender-based violence towards the reduction of femicides in Mexico.

Daryl Mangosing

Daryl Mangosing (They/He/She) was a fourth-year DrPH Candidate at UC Berkeley whose interests lie at the intersection of LGBTQ+ health disparities, community-engaged research, mixed-methods, public health discourse, and Critical Theory. For their doctoral studies, Daryl is interested in sexualized drug use (i.e., recreational or illicit drug use to facilitate and enhance sexual activity) and health outcomes among the sexual and gender diverse community in the context of HIV prevention. They were a Berkeley Public Health Graduate Fellow ‘22 in the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI) at UC Berkeley. Prior to Cal, they have worked at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies and Prevention Research Center in the Division of Prevention Science at UCSF, where they drove communication efforts and disseminated HIV prevention and public health research. On the side, they volunteer as a reviewer for conference abstracts, including for APHA Annual Meeting and Expo and the International AIDS Conference, as well as occasionally for a few peer-reviewed journals. As a queer Filipinx from Guam, Daryl received their MPH (Health Communication) from Tufts University and their BA (Health Sciences) from Berea College. Otherwise, Daryl also enjoys going out for nature/urban walks and good food and drinks; plays video games on PlayStation; excessively sends emojis and GIFs when texting; and serves as the human parent for an enigmatic Burmese cat, Sienna.

Amia Nash

Amia Nash is excited to start her fourth year of Berkeley’s DrPH program. She attended Santa Clara University for her undergraduate education where she was a public health major and triple minor in biology, sociology, and religious studies. Her diverse coursework challenged her to think critically about the intersections between public health and social justice. Amia earned her Master of Science in Community Health and Prevention Research from Stanford University School of Medicine. Her thesis focused on the ethical considerations for community-based research with homeless populations. Her past research was at the Stanford Center for Youth Mental Health and Well-being where she conducted qualitative research focused on the mental health needs and concerns of Asian-American adolescents and parents in Palo Alto. In 2019, Amia was nominated by the Santa Clara County Behavioral Health Department for a Community Hero Award for her policy and advocacy work focused on adolescent mental health. Amia is currently a graduate student researcher with UC Berkeley’s Innovation 4 Youth lab focusing on youth-led participatory action research (YPAR) in school settings and the use of research evidence in school district decision-making processes. Her research interests include YPAR, adolescent mental health, and social-emotional learning.

Jennifer Jarin

Jennifer Jarin received her BSN and MS in Community/Public Health Nursing (Environmental Health Specialty) from the University of Maryland, Baltimore. She also received an MA in Geography from the University of California, Davis. She specializes in issues of “place and health,” particularly regarding environmental justice and health equity.

She began her career as a pediatric intensive care unit nurse, and she worked for Baltimore City’s Reducing Asthma Disparities program. She later became a nursing instructor for UMSON and UCD BIMSON where she has facilitated university partnerships with Head Start programs. She has conducted place-based research at the UCD Center for Regional Change and the UC Berkeley Institute of Urban and Regional Development. She utilizes social justice-oriented critical theory and socio-spatial methods to examine how systemic racism impacts health. She is looking forward to concluding her Doctor of Public Health degree at UC Berkeley.

Julie Miller

Julie Miller is a fifth-year in the DrPH program. Julie’s interest in public health began as a high school student when she became inspired by the potential for nutrition to reduce, reverse, and prevent diseases. She studied the relationship between diet and disease as an undergraduate student and graduated with her BA in Public Health from UC Berkeley. After graduation, she moved to New York City to continue to pursue her interest in nutrition at the population level and received her MPH in Public Health Nutrition from NYU. She returned to California after graduation and completed her training and credentialing as a registered dietitian at UCSF. Her work experience as a pediatric dietitian at UCSF introduced her to the field of neonatal nutrition and ignited a passion within her for neonatal nutrition and health. Prior to starting the DrPH program, Julie worked as a neonatal and pediatric dietitian at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital. She is interested in neonatal nutrition research and hopes to investigate and develop nutrition strategies focused on disease prevention and health promotion among infants.