Alumni career paths—International Medicine

Bibhav Acharya M.D. ’11, Jason Andrews M.D. ’06, Sanjay Basu, M.D. ’09, Ph.D. ’09, Duncan Smith-Rohrberg Maru, M.D. ’09, Ph.D. ’09, and Ryan Schwarz M.D. ’11, M.B.A. ’11, while still in medical school, formed Nyaya, a clinic and hospital in a remote region of western Nepal. The hospital was founded with support from the Nepalese government and is completely staffed by local Nepalese health care providers.

Kyeen Mesesan Andersson, M.D. ’07, Ph.D. ’07, uses mathematical models to study epidemics of infectious disease. Much of her research has focused on HIV prevention in South Africa. She is a senior modeler and policy analyst at the Futures Institute, a global health organization based in Glastonbury, Conn., that specializes in the design and implementation of public health and social programs for developing countries. She is also a member of the Clinical and Health Services Research Core at Yale’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS.

Dagan Coppock, M.D. ’04, a poet and primary care physician who practiced near Boston, is spending two years in Botswana as a preceptor for Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center’s training program. He previously studied the poetry of traditional healers in Nigeria.

Kebba Jobarteh, M.D. ’02, M.P.H., heads the HIV care and treatment program in Mozambique for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He is a co-founder of Speak Up Young Africa, which has produced a documentary film highlighting the positive responses of young people to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and Burkina Faso. Jobarteh, who has worked in a number of African countries, served as a Pediatric AIDS Corps physician in Malawi, where he also worked with Partners in Health as director of pediatrics and pediatric infectious diseases.

Eric Krakauer, Ph.D. ’91, M.D. ’92, assistant professor of medicine, and of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a practicing internist and palliative medicine specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital, has been working in Vietnam since 2001, when he founded the Vietnam-CDC-Harvard Medical School AIDS Partnership to provide training and technical assistance in HIV/AIDS treatment to physicians and nurses in partnership with the Ministry of Health. As director of international programs at the Harvard Medical School Center for Palliative Care since 2005, Krakauer has assisted Vietnam’s Ministry of Health and major cancer centers and general hospitals to integrate pain relief and palliative care into the country’s health care system. Recently, Krakauer began working with Partners In Health to integrate pain relief and palliative care into cancer, HIV, and non-communicable disease treatment programs in Rwanda and Malawi.

Roger Mason, M.D. ’70, a vascular surgeon, worked in Trinidad and Tobago from 2004 to 2009 as a vascular surgeon, founding Caribbean Healing Arts, Ltd (CHA) in 2006 to improve the quality of health care in Caribbean emerging nations. CHA accomplishes its mission by building medical centers of excellence in Caribbean islands, recruiting “top docs” from North America and England who offer medical care to medical tourists as well as nationals. Profits from medical tourism operations subsidize care for nationals. Yale physicians and public health graduates who would like to participate in this effort are invited to contact Mason at shaman212@gmail.com.

Sarah Tishkoff, Ph.D. ’96, the David and Lyn Silfen Associate Professor in the departments of genetics and biology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, studies the genetic history of Africa and has found greater genetic diversity among Africans than in any other ethnic group.

Are you a physician who writes or works in another of the fields we’ll be profiling in our “Alumni Career Paths” series? Do you know medical school alumni, former Yale house staff, or fellows who are? Send us the names and then check the Web edition of Yale Medicine to view an expanding list of alumni with similar interests. You can write to us at ymm@yale.edu and view the list at yalemedicine.yale.edu.

“Alumni Career Paths” future topics:

• The front lines of clinical practice
• Academic medicine
• Sports medicine