Alumni Directory Display

Alumni Update:

David graduated from Harvard Medical School in 2013 and is completing an internal medicine internship. Then, he will start his Anesthesiology, Critical Care, & Pain Medicine residency training at Massachusetts General Hospital. He and Devan Darby (also a PiAf 2006-07 Fellow) got married in June 2014 in Virginia.

Fellow Bio:

David graduated from Princeton in 2006 with degrees in Geosciences and African Studies. He worked with the Baylor College of Medicine International Pediatric HIV/AIDS Initiative in Lesotho from 2006-07. He then worked with Dr. Christopher J.L. Murray at the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington and the Harvard Initiative for Global Health on a World Bank-funded road traffic injuries project and the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2010, which was published in the Lancet in December 2012. He graduated from Harvard Medical School with his MD in 2013, and will be pursuing Anesthesiology, Critical Care, and Pain Medicine residency training at Massachusetts General Hospital. His interests include health system management, health metrics, peri-operative systems, trauma care, critical care, pediatric, acute pain, and regional anesthesiology, and global health.

Alumni Update:

Joanna is working as an M&E Officer at Healthy Learners managing data systems and analytics/reporting. She lives in Lusaka, Zambia where she first arrived through her PiAf fellowship in 2019. 

Fellow Bio:

Joanna graduated from Calvin University with Honors in Economics with a minor in International Development Studies. Her curiosity about the world and the systems that shape people’s lives grew throughout her childhood and high school years spent in Michigan, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, as well as her experiences volunteering at the U.S. Embassy of Ethiopia, the African Women’s Entrepreneurship Program, and Hope Microfinance in Ethiopia. During her undergraduate career, she studied equity, access, and inclusion in the classroom and through interning at Inclusive Performance Strategies, organizing campus-wide programming on the Multicultural Student Advisory Board, and attending the Justice Studies Semester Program in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Prior to her Princeton in Africa fellowship, Joanna worked as a Research Specialist at the Center for Social Research where she collaborated with nonprofit, academic, and public-sector organizations on research projects involving data analytics, GIS mapping, community listening sessions, and database management. Here, she learned the power of data-based decisions and participatory research. Joanna is thankful for the opportunity to join the Monitoring and Evaluation team at Healthy Kids/Brighter Future and live in Lusaka! She looks forward to exploring new places through her favorite ways: being outdoors, dancing, and discovering cuisines.

Sarah, born and raised in rural Vermont, (Barnard ’17) graduated magna cum laude from Barnard College, Columbia University with a degree in Economics. At Barnard, Sarah completed a multi-year internship at EcoHealth Alliance, where she conducted a literature review evaluating the effectiveness of One Health interventions. While there, she was immersed in a multi-disciplinary team composed of scientists, veterinarians, and economists. This served as the impetus for her work at the interface of global health and economics. She has interned at the HIV, Health and Development group at UNDP, where she drafted a guidance note identifying integration opportunities for non-communicable diseases into the programming of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. She has researched the impacts of extractive industries on women as a Research Assistant for Barnard’s Department of Economics. Sarah has also consulted for the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, where she led a cost analysis of the Department’s responses to Hepatitis A incidents in restaurant food handlers. She has presented her research at conferences, including the 2017 Consortium of Universities for Global Health and 2018 World Bank Land and Poverty Conference and has several publications, including in the journals One Health and Annals of Climate Change.

Afi Apefa Bello is originally from Togo, West Africa. At the age of 6, her family immigrated to the United States. Having grown up aware of the circumstances which faced her family and others across the African continent, Afi was inspired to address them in her career, especially those concerning disparities in education and gender. Afi graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in May 2019, where she majored in African, African-American, and Diaspora Studies. While at UNC-CH, Afi studied several languages spoken across the African continent, including Kiswahili and Lingala. In 2017, she was awarded the U.S. Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship to study intensive Kiswahili in Tanzania through the Howard University Swahili Study Abroad program. Driven by her passion for education and gender equity, Afi returned to Tanzania in 2018 as an intern with non-profit organization Students for Students International (S4Si), in partnership with NGO Forum for African Women Educationalists where she worked to address gender disparities in secondary education in Zanzibar. Afi later became Co-Executive Director of S4Si. Through the Okun Foundation grant, Afi conducted research exploring Afro-Diasporic community relations. Afi remains curious as to the role which the African Diaspora plays in development in Africa. At UNC-CH, Afi was awarded the Annexstad Family Foundation Leaders of Tomorrow scholarship in its inaugural class, 2015, and was named a 2017 Harvey Beech scholar. After graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill, Afi served as a College Advisor with the Carolina College Advising Corps, working to increase college access and other post-secondary opportunities for low-income, first-generation, and underrepresented high school students. Afi volunteers with Refugee and Immigrant Community Partnership in North Carolina to address the needs of its immigrant communities. Afi enjoys sewing with African fabric, African literature, and learning new languages. She is excited to work with the African School of Economics this year!

Hannah graduated from the University of Michigan in 2014 with a degree in Global Health & Environment and Afro-American & African studies. After a trip to Ghana sparked her interest in Africa, Hannah solidified this passion by studying abroad in South Africa and leading support groups for HIV-affected teens. Throughout college, Hannah taught an innovative HIV prevention module to high-risk populations and did outreach and testing with Michigan’s leading AIDS service organizations. She also facilitated student sexual health forums, interned as a Spanish translator for undocumented persons with UMichigan’s Law School, facilitated prevention programming for elementary school girls at a women’s shelter in Michigan’s largest Latino neighborhood, and worked in arts-based activism. After graduation, Hannah worked at the American Red Cross in Detroit in International Services where she advocated on behalf of Iraqi and Syrian refugees and reconnected families separated by disaster and conflict. Hannah currently works in Detroit as a Health Education Coordinator for an HIV agency facilitating psychosocial support groups for recently diagnosed and formerly incarcerated individuals living with HIV. She enjoys spending her evenings working with at-risk teenage girls in a live-in scholarship program, and is excited to advocate similarly for teens and families at BIPAI Swaziland.

Fellow Bio:

Luwam is a politics major from Fairfax, VA. She also earned certificates in African studies and French language and literature. On campus, she was vice president of the Princeton Association of Black Women and small group leader for Manna Christian Fellowship. Luwam is looking forward to good conversations with locals and to learning about development from her colleagues while living in Burundi.

Lydia, a Public Health major from Skidmore College, is an enthusiastic and passionate young lady motivated by her need to serve. She has experience in project development and implementation through her Davis Project for Peace. With $10,000, she was able to develop and implement workshop sessions aimed at expecting parents and provided them with baby items for completion of sessions. Each session discussed topics from antenatal care, birth preparedness, and birth plans. Her independent undergraduate research sought to examine the factors that determine women’s choices during childbirth. She also has academic research experience conducted in multiple countries. During those times, she mostly explored healthcare and how one’s community and culture affects access, quality and cost. This developed her qualitative research skills with minimal resources. Lydia has also been able to develop and strengthen her monitoring and evaluation of projects skill via her work with various local NGOs.  She will be spending her year of the fellowship in Liberia working for Last Mile Health.

Katie grew up in Park City, Utah. She graduated from Dartmouth College in the Class of 2015 with a B.A. in Honors Environmental Studies and a minor in Applied Ethics. In addition to skiing and mountain biking, as a Dartmouth student Katie pursued her interdisciplinary interests in environmental science, environmental justice, and civil rights by conducting research in both the Biology and Environmental Studies Departments and the Ethics Institute.  In 2014, Katie interned in the Civil Rights Division of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office in Boston and studied abroad in Morocco. Her experience in Morocco and study of Arabic led to her senior honors thesis research on the influences of international politics on Moroccan phosphate mining. Upon her return from Morocco, Katie served as an AmeriCorps volunteer at Teton Science Schools in Wyoming, where she entered the world of environmental education. Katie believes that improving environmental justice across the globe starts with science literacy. In Rwanda, Katie is excited to work with the Rwanda School Project to develop environmental science curriculum and promote environmental literacy. Katie is a potter and a mountain bike racer, and is excited to learn Rwandan art and pottery methods and explore central Africa.