Our goal is to document solutions and exchange ideas on innovative projects in global health. When not overseas we are primarily located either in the Washington DC or the San Francisco Bay Area.

Email us: thdblog at gmail dot com with comments and suggestions or if you want to contribute a post to the blog. We have a whole range of people based around the world who contribute to the blog from time to time. As we get guest contributors we will introduce them on the main blog page. The biographies for the blog founders are below.

Aman was most recently a research fellow at the University of Maryland where his research focused on pharmaceutical policy, health outcomes and health technology assessment. He is passionate about innovations in health care domestically and globally. Aman received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in Health Policy & Management and a Master’s in epidemiology from the University of Minnesota. At Berkeley, he was a United Nations Management of Technology Fellow where he put together a team to research innovations in global health. In the past Aman has worked at Genentech, the UCSF Institute for Health Policy Studies, the Stanford Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and served as a director of the Knowledge and Social Responsibility Program for the National Conference for Community and Justice. He lives in the Washington DC area.

Jaspal recently finished his PhD in the College of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on human-centered design and evaluation methods for technology in rural health. As a Fulbright Scholar in Mongolia, he is collaborating with the National Health Development Center and Health Sciences University to provide nomadic, rural health workers with mobile information technology for continuing education. He has also worked on health technology research projects with rural populations in the United States, India, Guatemala, and Uganda. In industry, he has worked in manufacturing, mechanical design, product development, and software engineering roles for several firms, including Intel and Nokia. He received his Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He speaks English, Spanish, Punjabi, and Mongolian.

Farzaneh is a MA/MPH candidate in Health Policy and Management/ International Health at Boston University. She is currently creating a documentary film on her thesis “Innovative Solutions to Public Health Problems” – a survey of health innovations in the Southern Africa region.  Her primary research interest is improving health – whether it is improving the continuity of TB care for patients, helping create an interactive learning DVD for HIV clinicians in remote postings for Doctors without Borders, or assisting with quality of care improvement efforts in clinics and hospitals.   With film director Fiona Tudor-Price, she received funding from the European Union to convene a national workshop on health policy and the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT), and has completed a documentary film (now in post-production) on the personal experiences of three pregnant mothers and their journey through PMTCT. She has done medical research and public health work at Harvard, worked as an online community coordinator for the New York Times, and in Boston inner-city communities with City Year. She is currently based in Cape Town, South Africa.

Ben is a doctoral student in epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley, where his research focuses on private healthcare networks in East Africa. He currently splits his time between Uganda and California. His doctoral research, as technical advisor to Venture Strategies for Health and Development, is with the German Development Bank (KfW), the Uganda Ministry of Health, and Mbarara University of Science and Technology, Uganda. Project website: oba-uganda.net. In his free time, he serves on the board of the Northern California Peace Corps Association as well as the Vice-President of Friends of Ecuador, a 501c3 dedicated to continuing the spirit of Peace Corps service in Ecuador. Previously Ben worked at the CDC to develop training programs in HIV counseling and testing with national government partners in Kenya, Uganda, Zambia, and Namibia. From 1997-2000 he served in the US Peace Corps in Ecuador.

Rohan completed an MPH and MS from the University of California Berkeley/San Francisco Joint Medical Program and is on a gap year from his final year of medical school before continuing residency training in Family and Community Medicine. He is currently in India for a year as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar conducting public health research and working on health journalism and storytelling. Read more at his blog: www.rohanrad.blogspot.com In the past Rohan has worked as a Fulbright Scholar on indigenous health disparities in rural Ecuador, as the assistant to the United Nations Liaison for Médecins Sans Frontières in New York, as a Human Rights Fellow in Northern Uganda on the health effects of displacement, and as a humanitarian health consultant on child protection and shelter for UNICEF and the Norwegian Refugee Council. He is a student organizer for health reform and an avid believer in rights-based approaches. His current interests include technology and creativity driven advocacy, health systems, cost-effectiveness, and translational research. He is based in the SF Bay Area but is currently in India until June 2010.

More about this blog:
Global health problems are well documented and various organizations have been dedicated to this field for decades. Recently, disciplines outside public health have been using their skills to find solutions, whether that be private sector experts working on microfinance or engineers working to apply technology to problems in resource poor settings. The involvement of outside disciplines has brought new ideas, technologies and innovations to the toolbox for tackling global health problems. We believe these issues cannot be solved by any one idea or set of experts, and that collaboration is essential.

We want to bring together public health advocates, teachers, engineers, computer scientists and business/technology experts who may not normally interact in order to combine forces. We want to know what ideas are really working and by spreading the news we aim to connect people. While the blog will be initially more focused on the application of technology to global health because that is our background, we hope readers will also contribute solutions, innovative ideas or projects to the blog. This blog was created by students and professionals in epidemiology, health policy and management, engineering, and information technology. Our main goal is to share ideas and connect people.