Health and Governance Collaborative1
UCSF/UC Berkeley
Workshop: Experiments in Governance to Improve Global Health
March 20, 2015
Participant Biographies
Jennifer Bussell, UC Berkeley
Jennifer Bussell studies comparative politics with an emphasis on the political economy
of development and governance, principally in South Asia and Africa. Her research
considers the effects of formal and informal institutions—such as corruption, coalition
politics, and federalism—on policy outcomes. Her book Corruption and Reform In India:
Public Services in the Digital Age (Cambridge University Press) examines the role of
corrupt practices in shaping government adoption of information technology across subnational regions and is based on fieldwork in sixteen Indian states, as well as parts of
South Africa and Brazil. Her current research uses elite and citizen surveys, interviews,
and experiments to further explore the dynamics of corruption and citizen-state relations
as they relate to public service delivery in democratic states. She also studies the politics
of disaster preparedness policies in developing countries. Bussell received her Ph.D. in
Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley and prior to returning to
Berkeley taught in the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin.
Adithya Cattamanchi, UCSF
Adithya Cattamanchi is an Associate Professor in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical
Care Medicine and Co-Director of the CTSI Implementation Science Training Program at
UCSF. His research over the past five years has focused on the epidemiology of
tuberculosis (TB) in high burden countries and the development, evaluation, and
implementation of both conventional and novel TB diagnostics. He has helped establish a
TB/HIV cohort at Mulago Hospital in Kampala, Uganda. The cohort has resulted in
important publications related to the etiology and outcomes of pneumonia and the
performance of TB diagnostics in this population (>20 publications in past 5 years). His
ongoing research projects include the development and evaluation of mobile phone-based
tools to improve TB diagnosis, implementation of TB-related clinical practice guidelines
in high burden countries, and evaluation of strategies to implement TB diagnostic
services in a more patient-centered manner.
Nancy Czaicki, UC Berkeley
Nancy Czaicki, MSPH received her Masters Degree in Global Epidemiology from
Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University and is a PhD candidate in the
Division of Epidemiology at University of California, Berkeley. She has studied
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We are grateful to Social Science Matrix and the Center on the Politics of Development at UC Berkeley
and the UCSF Division of HIV/AIDS, Infectious Disease and Global Medicine for generous support of this
event.
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infectious disease epidemiology with a focus on HIV, and has expertise in
epidemiological methods, study design, and international fieldwork and research
implementation. Czaicki has experience in global public health relating to parasitic
diseases and HIV. She has previously coordinated and worked on projects relating to
congenital and transplantation transmission of Chagas disease and Schistosomiasis at the
CDC. Internationally, she conducted and led research in Zambia examining the
integration of couple’s HIV testing and counseling with antenatal care clinics, and also
examined the impact of a small incentive program on follow-up HIV testing rates among
couples in Zambia. Additionally, she has conducted economic research around user fees
and PMTCT services in Zimbabwe. Czaicki’s research is now centered on
implementation science, especially in the realm of HIV, and also examines contextual
factors such as economics and behavior change. Currently, she is the US project
coordinator for a randomized trial in Tanzania investigating the effect of food and cash
transfers on ART adherence and the data analyst for a large patient-tracing study
collecting improved outcome information among HIV patients lost-to-follow-up in
Zambia.
Thad Dunning, UC Berkeley
Thad Dunning is Robson Professor of Political Science at the University of California,
Berkeley and serves as the Director of the Center on the Politics of Development. He
studies comparative politics, political economy, and methodology; and his current work
on ethnic and other cleavages draws on field and natural experiments and qualitative
fieldwork in Latin America, India, and Africa. Before returning to Berkeley, where he
received a Ph.D. in Political Science and an M.A. in Economics, he was Professor of
Political Science at Yale University. Dunning has authored and co-authored several
books including Crude Democracy: Natural Resource Wealth and Political
Regimes (2008, Cambridge University Press), which won the Best Book Award from the
Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science
Association; Natural Experiments in the Social Sciences: A Design-Based
Approach (2012, Cambridge University Press), which was co-winner of the Best Book
Award from the Experimental Research Section of APSA; and Brokers, Voters, and
Clientelism: The Puzzle of Distributive Politics (2013, Cambridge University Press) with
Susan Stokes, Marcelo Nazareno, and Valeria Brusco. His articles have appeared in
leading journals, including the American Political Science Review, Comparative Political
Studies, International Organization, Political Analysis, and others.
Frederico Finan, UC Berkeley
Frederico Finan is Associate Professor of Economics and Political Economy at the
University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on a broad range of economic
topics in the areas of economic development and political economy, with a regional focus
on Latin America. Ongoing projects include examining the effects of financial incentives
on politicians’ performance and understanding the role of social preferences on voting
behavior. Finan has a Ph.D. in Agriculture and Resource Economics from UC Berkeley.
He is also an affiliate of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development
(BREAD), and a research fellow at IZA and the National Bureau of Economic Research
(NBER).
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Elvin Geng, UCSF
Elvin Geng is Assistant Professor of Medicine at UCSF in the Division of
HIV/AIDS. He is a physician within training in infectious diseases and
epidemiology. Geng’s research seeks to understand and improve the efficiency and
effectiveness of global care and treatment programs for HIV-infected individuals. His
current projects, funded by the NIH and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are
based in San Francisco, Uganda, Kenya and Zambia.
Matt Hickey, UCSF
Matt Hickey is currently in his last year of medical school at UCSF. He also co-directs
the Department of Research for the Organic Health Response, a community-based
organization in Kenya, and is the Director of Special Projects for Microclinic
International, an international NGO. He has been working with these organizations since
2010 to develop and evaluate a novel social network-based strategy for promoting
engagement and retention in HIV care in rural Kenya. During medical school, Hickey
spent one year working in Kenya as a Doris Duke fellow, and also studied epidemiology
and biostatistics in UCSF’s Advanced Training in Clinical Research program. His
additional academic interests include improving continuity of care during patient
migration, as well as applying implementation science principles to improve intervention
design, implementation, and reporting.
Noemi Kreif, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
Noemi Kreif is a post-doctoral research fellow in health economics, at the London School
of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Currently she is visiting the Division of Biostatistics
at UC Berkeley, undertaking collaborative research with Dr Maya Petersen. She focuses
on translating advanced causal inference methods to health economic evaluation and
decision modelling, in the complex settings of longitudinal confounding. She has
recently been awarded a 3 years UK Medical Research Council Early Career Fellowship
in the economics of health, on improving statistical methods to address confounding in
the economic evaluation of health interventions.
Jaclyn Leaver, UC Berkeley
Jaclyn Leaver is the Program Director at the Center on the Politics of Development at UC
Berkeley. She is responsible for developing the Center’s academic programming and
overseeing the administrative and financial operations of the Center, among other things.
Prior to this role, she spent time in Cambodia and Ghana working on small enterprise
development and climate change adaptation and resilience policy. Leaver holds an M.A.
in Global Policy Studies from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of
Texas, Austin and a B.A. in International and Area Studies from the University of
Oklahoma.
Nancy Padian, UC Berkeley
Nancy Padian, PhD, MPH, is an internationally recognized leader in the epidemiology
and prevention of STDs including HIV. She is senior scientific advisor at the Office of
the Global AIDS Coordinator (PEPFAR), and is on the faculty at the School of Public
Health at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) in the Department of
Epidemiology. At UCB, she is also a founding member of the Center of Evaluation for
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Global Action (CEGA), a multi-disciplinary research center advancing global health and
development through impact evaluation and economic analysis. This work includes
innovative work on the application of economic interventions in the health sector
including the use of individual and provider incentives. Padian is an elected member of
the Institute of Medicine, the American Epidemiology Society, and the International
Society for Sexually Transmitted Disease Research. She frequently consults for
UNAIDS, the World Bank, WHO, the FDA and NIH. She has served on the editorial
board of five international journals and has authored over 200 published articles. Padian’s
work bridges the gap among traditional infectious disease epidemiology, economics, and
the broader context of women's reproductive health. She has led numerous initiatives
dedicated to improving the health status of women and girls around the world by
conducting research on HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted infections (STIs),
reproductive health, domestic violence, gender and economic inequities, contraceptive
technologies and female-initiated methods of HIV prevention. Her current research
focuses mainly health systems research and evaluating sustainable delivery methods for
large-scale programs on HIV and reproductive health. More generally, at PEPFAR,
working with Charles Holmes she helped launch an implementation science research
agenda addressing HIV-related prevention, care and treatment.
Maya Petersen, UC Berkeley
Maya Petersen is Assistant Professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the University
of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include causal inference, and machine
learning, and design and analysis of cluster randomized trials. Petersen’s applied work
focuses on developing and evaluating improved HIV prevention and care strategies in
resource-limited settings.
Daniel Posner, UCLA
Daniel N. Posner is the James S. Coleman Professor of International Development in the
Department of Political Science at UCLA. His research focuses on ethnic politics,
research design, distributive politics and the political economy of development in Africa.
His most recent co-authored book, Coethnicity: Diversity and the Dilemmas of Collective
Action (Russell Sage, 2009) employs experimental games to probe the sources of poor
public goods provision in ethnically diverse communities. His first book, Institutions and
Ethnic Politics in Africa (Cambridge, 2005), explains the conditions under which politics
revolves around one dimension of ethnic cleavage rather than another. He has received
several awards for his work, including the Luebbert Award for best book in Comparative
Politics (2006 and 2010), the Heinz Eulau Award for the best article in the American
Political Science Review (2008), the Michael Wallerstein Award for the best article in
Political Economy (2008), the best book award from the African Politics Conference
Group (2006), and the Sage Award for the best paper in Comparative Politics presented
at the APSA annual meeting (2004). He has been a Harvard Academy Scholar (1995-98),
a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution (2001-02), a Carnegie Scholar (2003-05) and
a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2010-11). Posner
currently serves on the editorial boards of World Politics, the Journal of Politics, the
Journal of Experimental Political Science and World Development. He is the co-founder
of the Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE) and a member of the
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executive committee of the Experiments in Governance and Politics (EGAP) network. He
received his B.A. from Dartmouth College and his Ph.D. from Harvard University.
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