University of North Carolina Center for Global Initiatives
University of North Carolina Global
Lydia Boyd
Assistant Professor, Department of African and Afro-American Studies
Lydia Boyd is a cultural anthropologist whose fieldwork in and around Kampala, Uganda has concerned the politics of HIV/AIDS prevention within religious communities. Her work highlights how moral discourses about sexuality and the changing dynamics of gender and generational relations have impacted the efficacy of particular "global" health messages. Her first experience conducing ethnographic fieldwork was as a college student on a semester abroad program in eastern Uganda.
Burcu Bozkurt
Senior, Global Studies and Health Policy and Management
In the summer of 2011, Burcu Bozkurt interned with an organization in Bangladesh that works with underserved and vulnerable river-island communities in the rural north, developing their monitoring and evaluation capacity within their community health worker program. Last fall, Burcu participated in the Burch Field Research Seminar in Hanoi, Vietnam where she collected primary data on healthcare providers' attitudes on abortion for her undergraduate honors thesis.
Cate Brubaker
Program Manager and Instructor, Carolina Navigators
Cate Brubaker has over 15 years of experience in intercultural education as a teacher, trainer, researcher, and program developer. In addition to living in Germany for four years, she has worked and traveled throughout the US, Europe, the Caribbean, and Latin America. She is also founder of SmallPlanetStudio.com, co-founder of a new study abroad-related start-up, and was recently elected to the Board of SIETAR-USA (Society for Intercultural Education, Training & Research).
Gina Difino
Assistant Director, MBA Global Programs at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School
Gina Difino manages the Global Immersion Electives designed and created for Kenan-Flagler MBA students. Gina's encounters with international education started at home. Exploring the differences between her family's Italian culture and that of the community encouraged her to explore how different people interact and communicate. Since then, her work and schooling have taken her to study, work, or teach in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, the Caribbean and Central America. Gina seeks to bring the international into general education through classroom teaching, educational outreach, advising and support, curriculum development, and bringing students abroad to experience the world.
Mindy Feng
Senior, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Mindy Feng worked as a biomedical technician last summer in a small hospital in Northern Honduras. She worked with a non-profit organization, first receiving training to be a technician then working full-time in a rural area. It was a challenging experience for her, both technically and culturally. The GO! Orientation made her aware of some of the cultural differences she did not consider before, so she is excited to pass on some of her own experiences.
Danielle Gilliard
Senior, Global Health and Environment
Danielle Gilliard is a senior who has had two study abroad experiences in Southeast Asia. During the summer of her freshmen year, she studied abroad with the Carolina Southeast Asia Summer Abroad program in Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia studying nationalism, migration and Southeast Asian history. She spent her fall semester senior year in Vietnam with the Burch Research Seminar Program at the Hanoi School of Public Health where she studied Vietnamese, Public Health history in Vietnam, HIV/AIDS and oral history. During her time at UNC, she has encouraged all students, but especially minority, first year and science/pre-health major students, to seriously consider studying abroad.
Mamie Harris
Director of Africa Programs, Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases
Mamie Harris is the Africa Programs Director at the UNC Institute for Global Health & infectious Diseases. She has worked in the field of public health for over 10 years. She has lived and worked in various regions of the world - West Africa, East Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe and North America. Her interests are in humanitarian emergencies, food security and cultural immersion. She co-lectures the "Interdisciplinary Perspectives of Global Health" course (PUBH 510) in the Gillings School of Global Public health and the inter-institutional ONE Health course (PUBH 690, section 008) cross-listed with Duke and North Carolina State University.
David Holcomb
Senior, Environmental Sciences
Following a month in Zimbabwe (and a weekend in Cape Town) visiting family friends after his freshman year, David Holcomb fell in love with the region and was anxious for any opportunity to return. He found this through SIT's Community Health and Social Policy program in Durban, South Africa, where David lived with a Zulu family for the better part of two months, met and learned from individuals at every level of the health care system--from rural traditional healers to school teachers and nurses, to internationally respected pharmaceutical researchers--and had the freedom to travel the country conducting original research of his own design for a month, with ample support from SIT staff and affiliates.
Molly Hrudka
Junior, Anthropology and Global Studies
Molly Hrudka spent three months in Masaka, Uganda interning with the AIDS Support Organization in their HIV laboratory and implementing a sustainable, grant-funded rural community development project. She also worked as an intern with the National Centre in HIV Social Research in Sydney, Australia conducting analytical research for a viral kinship study focused on the Sydney and Melbourne gay community.
Jimmy Jean-Baptiste
Graduate Student, Department of Health Behavior
Jimmy Jean-Baptiste, BA is currently obtaining his MPH in the Department of Health Behavior Health Education at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. Jimmy obtained his BA in sociology from Brown University, where his interests in health promotion started during his service as a coordinator of a HIV/AIDS education project. While at UNC, he is continuing his commitment to service as a HIV counselor through the Student Health Action Coalition (SHAC). Furthermore, he is focused on learning about community-based participatory research as a Research Assistant out of the CBPR Core for the NC TraCS project, Community Engagement Consulting Models: Taking Them to Scale.
Suzannah Ellis Johnston
Graduate Student, Department of Health Behavior
Suzannah is a second year Masters student in the Department of Health Behavior at the Gillings School of Global Public Health. She received a BA in International Studies from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2006 and joined the Peace Corps soon after graduation. She worked in Niger and Liberia in various health-focused capacities before returning to UNC to pursue her graduate degree. Suzannah’s public health interests lie in women’s health, reproductive rights and community-based work in a global context.
Joseph Jordan
Director, Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History
Joseph Jordan is associate professor of African/African-American Studies and director of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the former director of the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African-American Culture and History in Atlanta and was founding chair of African/African-American Studies at Antioch College. His teaching interests are the African diaspora in the Americas, with a focus on art, cultural politics and the role of culture in social movements. He also leads a study abroad program in Venezuela that explores Afro-Venezuelan social, cultural and political movements.
Erin Keefe
Senior, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Erin Keefe is a senior from Weaverville, North Carolina majoring in Latin American Studies with a minor in Biology and Afro-American Studies. In the fall of 2010, she was a student in the UNC international cross-cultural studies program through the Sonja Haynes Stone Center in Higuerote, Venezuela studying Spanish and the African diaspora in Latin America. This past summer she spent two months in Bolivia as an intern to a traveling clinic that provided free health care to communities along the Beni River in the upper Amazon. She has also traveled independently to Argentina, Spain, and Costa Rica. After college, she plans to attend nursing school for women's health and later practice in Latin America.
Bowen Kelley
Junior, African Studies and French
Bowen Kelley is a Junior double-major in African Studies and French. He has lived and traveled extensively in West Africa, including a year spent in Niger on his father's Fulbright Scholarship. Bowen recently returned from South Africa, where he had spent his fall semester as a participant in UNC's Honors Semester in Cape Town. In addition to attending classes led by both UNC and South African faculty, during his semester in Cape Town Bowen served as an Intern in the Psycho-Social Intervention Department of the Cape Town Refugee Centre, an organization dedicated filling its United Nations-mandated goal of providing short-term assistance to vulnerable refugees in the Western Cape region.
Tom Kelley
Professor, UNC School of Law
Tom Kelley is a professor and director of clinical programs at UNC School of Law. His international work focuses on American and European efforts to "westernize" state legal systems in Africa. Much of his fieldwork has focused on Niger, where he served as a Peace Corps volunteer from 1986 to 1988 and a Fulbright Scholar from 2003 to 2004.
Alexandra Lightfoot
Director of Community-Based Participatory Research Core, Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention
Alexandra Lightfoot, Ed.D, is the Assistant Director of Community Engagement/Partnerships and the Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) Core at the UNC Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention. She is also Adjunct Lecturer in the Health Behavior and Health Education Department at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, where she co-teaches a graduate seminar on CBPR and Photovoice. In addition to travels, her international experience includes serving as a volunteer teacher at a Harambee school for girls in rural Kenya and living with her family in Niger, West Africa.
Michal Osterweil
Lecturer, Department of Global Studies
Michal Osterweil is a lecturer and director of internships at the UNC Department of Global Studies and director of global programming at the Campus Y. She completed her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology with a certificate in Cultural Studies from UNC Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on contemporary social movements and their knowledge production. Her dissertation focused on the theoretical-practice and political imaginaries of the Italian Global Justice Movement and related transnational networks, in particular those affiliated with Zapatismo. She has also published on World and Regional Social Forums, as well as other actors active in contemporary anti-capitalist movements.
Greg Randolph
Senior, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Greg Randolph's global travel began with the thought of climbing the biggest mountains there are. He signed up for a mountaineering trip in the Indian Himalayas and found himself humbled and awestruck, not just by the landscapes but by the resilient mountain cultures he encountered. He has returned several times to South Asia for service, study abroad, employment, research and just traveling. He has chosen to engage with the region in his academic endeavors as well. On campus, Greg works with Nourish International and often engages in thinking about what it means to do meaningful and ethical work abroad. Greg looks forward to discussing these topics at GO!
Andrew Reynolds
Chair, Curriculum in Global Studies
Andrew Reynolds, Associate Professor of Political Science, focuses his research and teaching on democratization, constitutional design and electoral politics. He has worked for the United Nations, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), the UK Department for International Development, the US State Department, the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the International Foundation for Election Systems. He has also served as a consultant on issues of electoral and constitutional design for Afghanistan, Angola, Burma, Egypt, Fiji, Guyana, Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Netherlands, Netherlands Antilles, Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sudan, Tunisia, Yemen, and Zimbabwe; most recently in the summer and fall of 2011 in Tripoli and Benghazi, Libya and Cairo, Egypt.
Friederike Seeger
Director of Burch Programs and Honors Study Abroad, Honors Carolina
Friederike Seeger is director of Burch Programs and Honors Study Abroad and works with internship programs in Cape Town, London, and Beijing. Prior to her appointment at UNC Chapel Hill in 2005, Ms. Seeger completed an M.A. in International Education at the School for International Training and worked with the Dean of SIT Study Abroad on international experiential learning programs. Her areas of interest include international program development, foreign language learning, and internationalization of higher education.
Ron Strauss
Executive Vice Provost and Chief International Officer, Office of the Provost
Ron Strauss, UNC's Executive Vice Provost and a faculty member in the Schools of Dentistry and Medicine for over three decades, is also the university's Chief International Officer. His education includes a B.A. in Biology from Queens College, a Doctorate in Dentistry from the University of Pennsylvania, and a subsequent M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology, also from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a clinician and member of the UNC Craniofacial Center team caring for children and adults with cleft lip, cleft palate and other craniofacial conditions.
Jim Thomas
Associate Professor, Department of Epidemiology
Jim Thomas has lived in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Kenya and has worked in other countries throughout Africa. As Deputy Director for the MEASURE Evaluation Project, he oversees monitoring and evaluation activities worldwide for HIV and other infectious diseases. Dr. Thomas developed a course on ethics for the UNC Global Health certificate, and was the principal author of the American Public Health Association Code of Ethics. In addition to his professional work in Africa, Dr. Thomas founded Africa Rising, a non-profit organization that builds the capacity of African founded organizations by networking them together.