CHW Central is guided by experts in CHW programming and policy as part of our Technical Advisory Group. The TAG helps us keep abreast of new developments, research, and activities.
Professor Joseph Ana is Lead Senior Fellow and Consultant at the Africa Centre for Clinical Governance Research and Patient Safety at HRI West Africa in Calabar, Nigeria. He is a member of the HIFA Steering Group and the HIFA Working Group on community health workers. Joseph was driven by his interest in strengthening health systems for quality care improvement to leave a lucrative medical practice in the UK and return to Nigeria to take up post as Commissioner for Health in Cross River State. As Commissioner, he led the designing and pilot of the 12-Pillar Clinical Governance Programme in Nigeria. Professor Ana is the Country Coordinator of Practical Approach to Care Kit (PACK) Nigeria Programme for Primary Health Care, and a member of the Statutory National Tertiary Health Institutions Standards Committee of the Federal Ministry of Health of Nigeria. He has been the pioneer Chairman of both the NMA National Committee on Clinical Governance and Research since 2012 and the Quality & Performance subcommittee of the Technical Working Group for the implementation of the Nigeria Health Act 2014. He is a pioneer Trustee-Director of the NMF (Nigerian Medical Forum) which took the British Medical Journal to West Africa in 1995.
Wuleta Betemariam is the Director for JSI’s Center for Healthy Women, Children and Communities. Prior to joining the Center, Ms Betemariam was the Project Director for the Last Ten Kilometers Project in Ethiopia which focused on community health systems funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, UNICEF, and USAID. Ms Betemariam served as the Deputy Director of EngenderHealth’s Program Division in New York, where she provided strategic direction and oversight of country and global programs. Before joining EngenderHealth in New York, Ms Betemariam established EngenderHealth’s presence in Ethiopia as well as a program in Sudan and was the country director for the two countries. Ms. Betemariam also has seven years experience as technical advisor for USAID’s Population, Health and Nutrition Office, with focus in Ethiopia. Ms. Betemariam holds a Masters Degree in Public Health and Public Policy from the University of Michigan. Wuleta is currently enrolled in a Doctoral Program in Public Health Leadership at the University of Illinois – Chicago. Her dissertation is focused on the factors of high and low performance of the Health Extension Workers in Ethiopia.
Donna Bjerregaard was a Senior Technical Advisor at Initiatives Inc. for 20 years, providing support to civil society organizations, community groups, governments and international organizations. She managed CHW Central from its inception in 2011 until her retirement in 2018; the development of the site to date is a result of her outstanding stewardship.
Donna has extensive experience in curriculum design, quality improvement, community health worker assessment tools, organizational and program capacity development and training and community health promotion. She has authored training manuals, handbooks and position papers. During her long career in public health development, Donna lived and worked in India, Nigeria, and Jordan and provided technical assistance in Africa, Asia and South America. Donna is excited to stay connected to the CHW Central community as a TAG member.
Carey Carpenter Westgate is the Deputy Director of the Community Health Impact Coalition (CHIC), a field catalyst that exists to make professionalized community health workers (CHWs) a norm worldwide. Prior to joining CHIC, Carey was a Partnerships Manager at Living Goods. In this role, she worked with international NGOs and private sector partners to design and implement innovative CHW programs. Carey has previous experience with Deloitte Consulting, where her clients included the World Bank Group and the USAID Mission to Mozambique. Carey holds an MPH from Johns Hopkins University, a BA from Wake Forest University, and a Certificate in Global Health from Johns Hopkins University.
Seth Doyle is the Manager of the Community Health Improvement Program at the Northwest Regional Primary Care Association (NWRPCA) In this role, he oversees NWRPCA’s examination of, and response to, changing population demographics and dynamics, models of community collaboration that address health disparities and promote equity, models of clinical care delivery, and workforce and staffing innovations for community health centers. Seth joined NWRPCA in 2007 as Migrant Health Coordinator, providing training and technical assistance to migrant health centers in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.
Prior to joining NWRPCA, Seth worked as a Health Educator and Case Manager for the Urban League of Rhode Island. Seth holds a master’s degree in Latin American Studies with a Public Health Minor from the University of New Mexico. Seth’s research interests include migration, health, and human rights. He has studied and conducted field research in Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, and Mexico.
Durrell J. Fox is a Community Health Worker (CHW) with over 27 years of experience providing outreach, direct services, case management support and advocacy for HIV+ adolescents/young adults, their families and communities. He is currently a Community Health Worker-Health Equity Consultant at JSI and recently served as a Technical Advisor for the MA Department of Public Health’s Prevention and Wellness Trust Fund (PWTF) which employs over 70 CHWs across the state. He is a proud member of the CHW workforce continuing to serve in a volunteer CHW role coordinating and staffing a young men’s rites of passage program in Boston for young men.
Diana Frymus is a Health Systems Strengthening Advisor in the Office of HIV/AIDS, USAID Washington, DC. Her work focuses on strengthening health systems to achieve and sustain national HIV responses. Her area of expertise is human resources for health and puts particular focus on better integration of CHWs into national health systems and health worker agendas. She was a member of the Steering Committee for the USG Evidence Summit on Community and Formal Health System Support to Enhance CHW Performance. She is also a technical advisor for both the USAID CapacityPlus and ASSIST projects. Diana has previous experience with the Clinton Global Initiative and also served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Uganda. She received her MPH from Columbia University.
Dan Irvine is the Operations and Resource Development Director at World Vision International, where he has emphasized CHW support as the core methodology for achieving WVI’s strategic MCHN objectives since 2007. Previously he directed the World Vision US grant acquisition and management department, and before that spent 15 years in Africa working primarily in the agriculture sector. Dan holds a MSc. in Peace Operations (George Mason University), a BSc. in Community Psychology (Nova Southeastern), and a certificate in Agriculture Extension (University of South Carolina).
Dr. Shreya Kangovi is the founding Executive Director of the Penn Center for Community Health Workers, and an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. She is a leading expert on improving population health through evidence-based community health worker programs. Dr. Kangovi has authored numerous scientific publications and received over $30M in funding, including federal grants from the NIH and PCORI. She is the recipient of the Academy Health Research Impact Award, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Equity Award, an elected member of the American College of Physicians and a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Roundtable on the Promotion of Health Equity.
Jodi Lis is Senior Advisor, Transformative Learning, in the Center for Technical Excellence at IntraHealth. She has over twenty years experience designing and implementing digital learning interventions in workforce development, pre-service education and capacity-building initiatives for health and education sectors throughout Africa. Her roles have included project director, instructional designer, trainer, business analyst, eLearning developer and learning analyst. Previously Jodi worked at Jhpiego providing technical leadership on integrating digital learning in midwifery and community nursing schools and health workforce, in FHI360 managing educational technology interventions and directed a local organization in The Gambia to promote the use of technology in education.
Lizah Masis is the Country Investment & Knowledge Director with the Financing Alliance for Health, engaging with a spectrum of stakeholders — including governments, major NGOs, global funders, banks, and private investors — to design, develop and implement financing solutions to address health sector investment gaps in developing countries.
Lizah has prior experience at Wells Fargo’s Financial Institutions Group, and served as the Business Development and Finance lead for the internationally renowned London School of Economics Africa Summit, a dynamic platform for a robust conversation on issues impacting the African continent. She holds a BA in Economics and Mathematics from Swarthmore College (USA) and an MSc in Health Economics & Policy from the London School of Economics (UK).
David Musoke, MSc, PhD is a Lecturer in the Department of Disease Control and Environmental Health at Makerere University School of Public Health (MakSPH), Uganda. David is Co-Chair of the Health Systems Global Thematic Working Group on Community Health Workers (CHWs). He is also a Senior Visiting Fellow at Nottingham Trent University (NTU), UK as well as the Uganda lead of the MakSPH – NTU health partnership that has supported over 600 CHWs for more than 10 years. He has been involved in vast work related to CHWs including teaching, programme implementation, management and research which has been disseminated extensively including publications. David is also the Secretary of the International Federation of Environmental Health (IFEH) Africa group, as well as Chair of the Africa Academy for Environmental Health.
Daniel Palazuelos, MD, MPH is a global health implementor-educator who holds positions at Harvard Medical School, the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Partners In Health (PIH) including: clinical work as an attending physician with the BWH hospitalist in-patient service; graduate medical education support as the assistant director of the Global Health Equity residency at BWH; clinical and research leadership as the chief strategist for PIH-Mexico; accompaniment of CHW projects across all PIH sites through a quality improvement task force that hosts summits, authors papers, and represents PIH at national and international meetings.
For years, Dan worked to create the strategy for, and successfully launch, of the PIH project in Mexico, Compañeros en Salud-Mexico, which is not only a service provider for local people in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Chiapas, but also a platform for U.S. and Mexican medical trainees to learn about global health and to conduct implementation research. In addition to an emphasis on extensive preparation and on-site mentorship, this program offers collaborators the capacity to support intensive and logistically complex research efforts.
Henry Perry, III, MD, PhD, MPH is a Senior Associate in the Health Systems Program of the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. He joined Hopkins in 2009; his career prior to that has included stints working with Future Generations, Curamericas Global, ICDDR,B, the BASICS Project in Bangladesh, and Hôpital Albert Schweitzer in Haiti. His work has taken him to many countries, including Bangladesh, Bolivia, Haiti, Afghanistan, Tibet (China), Arunachal Pradesh (India), and Peru. Dr. Perry has a formal background in medicine (including general surgery), public health, sociology and anthropology; he conducts research on community-based primary health care.
Emma Sacks, PhD, is a Faculty Associate in the Program on Health Systems in the Department of International Health at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and is the liaison between the Technical Working Group on Supporting and Strengthening the Role of Community Health Workers of Health Systems Global and CHW Central. Her research focuses on the intersection of newborn health and HIV and the role that families and community health workers play in obstetric and infant care in resource-limited settings. She has also has a keen interest in strengthening health systems in conflict- and disaster- afflicted states and developing methods for supporting both formal and informal providers during crises.
Dr. Sacks has been involved in a research study analyzing a database of 50 years worth of community-based primary health care programs and an assessment of the use of mHealth technologies for community health nurses. She has worked on maternal and child health issues in Zambia, Uganda, Ghana, Bangladesh, Honduras, Mexico, and Haiti and has worked as a consultant for a number of organizations, including APHA, Save the Children, John Snow Inc., IDRC, and UNICEF.
