Faculty
Dr. Sanam Roder-DeWan, MD, DrPH, is a family physician and implementation scientist in the Dartmouth Health Department of Community and Family Medicine. She is focused on closing the global maternal and newborn health equity gap through health system reforms that improve quality of care at scale for marginalized populations in the US and in low- and middle-income countries.
Dr. Patience Toyin-Thomas, MD, PhD, is a general pediatrician and health services researcher in the Dartmouth Health Department of Pediatrics. She is focused on disparities in access to high-quality care among children enrolled in Medicaid, an economically disadvantaged population.
Dr. Milan Satcher, MD, MPH, is a board-certified family medicine physician in the Dartmouth Health Department of Community and Family Medicine. She is focused on improving access, coordination, and utilization of health care for individuals with complex health needs who are vulnerable to criminalization and criminal legal system involvement.
Dr. Dana Ferrari-Light DO, MPH, is a thoracic surgeon in the Dartmouth Health Department of Surgery. She is focused on researching disparities in access to lung cancer screening especially in women and rural populations.
Predoctoral
PhD student Jackie Chiofalo, MPA, is our inaugural predoctoral fellow from CUNY. Ms. Chiofalo is a Director of Policy Research and Analysis at the Institute for Family Health, a New York-based federally qualified health center, whose research uses claims data to study health equity quality metrics for providers.
Sukriti Beniwal, an Economics PhD student at Georgia State University, studies the interplay of health policy, institutions and market dynamics. Her research focuses on the scope of practice laws of healthcare providers and the influence of licensing laws on healthcare expenditures, obstetric outcomes and medication adherence. With TDI fellowship support, Ms. Beniwal plans to utilize Medicaid and pharmacy claims data to advance scholarly understanding of occupational regulation in healthcare and inform the development of policies that champion maternal health and ensure health equity.
DocPath
Anji Zhu completed her nursing degree before joining TDI. She is passionate about advancing culturally relevant healthcare experiences for vulnerable populations, particularly individuals with chronic conditions. These patients require clear information and support throughout their healthcare journey, especially during transitions such as hospital discharge, the initiation of new therapy, or a shift to palliative care.
Anji aims to understand patients’ experiences and needs more deeply, developing instruments to measure patients’ preparedness for potential care transitions. In her year as a DocPath fellow, Anji will work in Dr. Catherine Saunders’ lab, where she will learn tool development methods to assist patients in shared decision-making at their early disease stages.
Class of ’74 Health Equity Scholars
Najma Bore (D’27; Cognitive Science major, Global Health and International Studies double minor) joined the Sustainable Health Lab during her freshman spring under the mentorship of Prof. Inas Khayal. Her current research involves a comprehensive analysis of health equity data from hospitals nationwide, aiming to evaluate and understand their efforts in reducing healthcare delivery disparities. Through qualitative analysis, this data will help shape and inform strategies to promote more equitable and effective healthcare practices.
Sunny Cui (D’27; Cognitive Science) is currently developing a predictive risk tool to support clinician decision-making. Sunny is a member of the Fortuna Lab, which focuses on studying vulnerable populations at risk of serious mental illness and the benefits of peer support. Sunny is passionate about leveraging digital health research to improve mental health outcomes.
Asha Dees (D’25; Biological Sciences) is a senior at Dartmouth College studying biology and international affairs. She is broadly interested in the use of technology to address health disparities which she has explored as a Global Health Fellow and published contributor for the National Association of Science Writers. As a Health Equity Scholar, Asha is grateful for the mentorship of Dr. Milan Satcher and seeks to evaluate the anticipated barriers, facilitators, and recommendations for implementing Medicaid Reentry 1115 waivers in rural contexts to help improve reentry care-transitions for adults with criminal legal involvement & opioid use disorder.
Vismaya Gopalan (D’27; Biochemistry and Hispanic Studies) is collaborating with Dr. Christine Gunn on a project/study aimed at testing the feasibility of a multi-level intervention that integrates environmental risk factors, specifically PFAS exposure, into breast cancer screening decision-making. The project focuses on developing clinician and patient tools to improve communication around PFAS risks, including an adapted breast cancer screening decision aid and a Continuing Medical Education module on PFAS risk counseling. By partnering with women from PFAS-affected communities, the study seeks to empower informed health decisions through enhanced risk communication.
Hope Hall (D’26; Engineering and Government) is working on a phase 3 feasibility study looking at increased kidney cancer incidence in Merrimack,NH. She is examining how to get the citizens of Merrimack to participate in the study. From this and other data, it is possible to ascertain if PFAS or other pollutants are causing the increased levels of kidney cancer.
Emily Leung (D’27; Government and Economics) is mentored by Dr. Karen Schifferdecker. Her current work focuses on addressing disparities in primary care access and quality for older adults using mixed methods research. Through social policy analysis, she will identify trends in primary care access and how they vary for less-advantaged populations due to potential social, economic, and cultural factors. By examining policy differences across state lines, she aims to help formulate possible improvements in primary care access among adults in the United States.
Izzy Morales (D’25; Sociology and Hispanic Studies; he/him), mentored by Dr. Paul Barr and Dr. Ale Martinez, is involved in the “VOiCES3” project, which studies and enhances patient-provider interpersonal communication through the innovative use of HealthPAL, a clinic visit audio recording intervention. This project focuses on improving mental health treatment, support, and access to resources for both English and Spanish-speaking patients suffering from dementia; with cohorts at Dartmouth College and NYU, this research supports patients in the Upper Valley and New York City. He will be working to support participant recruitment and conduct in-depth analysis and coding of Spanish-speaking patient clinic visit transcripts.
This work aims to deepen the collective understanding of communication dynamics in triadic dementia care visits and assess the feasibility and effectiveness of visit recordings in improving care for vulnerable populations. This research is particularly meaningful to Izzy, as it aligns with his broader passion of working to address health inequities among marginalized communities, including non-English-speaking, Latine populations.
Annika Nikhar (D’26; Mathematics modified by Biology) is working with Dr. Alka Dev on a project surrounding reproductive justice for people with disabilities. In particular, she aims to investigate the social determinants of maternal and sexual health. On campus, she conducts tissue engineering research and is strongly passionate about sexual violence prevention.
Miranda Scully (D’26; Computer Science) is mentored by Professor Wesley Marrero. She is working on a project titled “Social Determinants of Health” examining social and demographic factors that impact access to preventive gynecological care in New Hampshire. As a part of Professor Marrero’s research group, Miranda focuses on statistical data analysis.
Gaia Yun (D’25; Biology) is from Mukilteo, Washington majoring in biology and minoring in studio art. She is interested in environmental health and the intersection of health and humanities. She hopes to pursue a career in academic medicine and public health.
Past Participants
Predoctoral
Abhirupa Dasgupta, MPH, (DocPath 2023-24) came to TDI’s MPH program with a relatively quantitative academic background; her undergraduate degrees from UT Austin (Hook ’em!) are in neuroscience and biochemistry. However, throughout the course of her MPH curriculum, she became interested in qualitative methods and the unique ability of this research framework to give research participants a degree of ownership over the research process. During her year as a DocPath fellow, Abhirupa worked in Dr. Terri Lewinson’s lab, learning how to apply qualitative methods to explore how inequities in the social determinants of health can make some members of our community more vulnerable to mental and physical health problems than others. Abhirupa hopes to use these skills to explore and address healthcare inequities faced by diverse immigrant populations around the US, especially as they age.
TDI MPH graduate Kedryn Berrian MA, MPH, (DocPath 2022-23) spent her fellowship year supporting Dartmouth HEAL faculty. She is interested in mental health outcomes and disparities in POC LGBTQIA+ communities and their access to behavioral health care. Kedryn now serves as the Education Coordinator in the Department of Family Medicine at Georgetown University School of Medicine.
TDI MPH graduate Moraa Onsando, MD, MPH, was the first local predoctoral fellow at TDI. She worked with faculty members in TDI’s Health Equity and Advocacy Lab and successfully matriculated into the TDI PhD program in September 2022. Her research focuses on optimizing the patient-provider relationship through patient-centered communication, and exploring housing, food insecurity, and discrimination as social determinants of health.
Class of ’74 Health Equity Scholars
Esmeralda Abreu-Jerez (D’25; Geography and Quantitative Social Science), was mentored by Dr. Erika Moen and Dr. Alka Dev. She worked on a project titled “Disparities in receipt of obstetric/gynecological preventive care: An All of Us cohort study” that aimed to identify disparities in receipt of obstetric/gynecological (OB/GYN) preventive care and determine barriers to care access. The research team leveraged data from the All of Us Research Program, an NIH initiative to provide centralized, secure access to expansive health data from diverse populations. Among a cohort of adult women aged 18-49 years, Esmeralda and the writing team examined factors associated with self-reported receipt of an OB/GYN appointment from 2018-2022. Click here for a project summary.
Uma Alagappan (she/her) (D’25; Quantitative Social Science), worked with Dr. Alka Dev in the MATRIXCo Lab on research that focused on the maternal healthcare experiences and outcomes of folks with disabilities. Within the field of health equity, she contributed to work that centers quality of life for folks living with disability and chronic illness, mental health support for LGBTQIA+ communities of color, and the social and emotional dimension of palliative care.
Priyanshu Alluri (D’26; Biophysics) was mentored by Dr. Wesley Marrero. Priyanshu worked on a project titled “Socially Fair Clustering Algorithm of Mental Health Profiles of Students in the United States.” This work was motivated by the fact that rates of mental illness under- and misdiagnosis are much higher in minority groups than among their majority population counterparts. Furthermore, the profiles typically used to diagnose mental health illnesses do not account for differences across racial groups, distributing the cost unfairly toward minority groups. Using a social definition of fairness, Priyanshu and his coauthors aimed to determine a clustering of student mental health profiles that equitably distributes cost across each racial group. Such a fair mental health profile has the potential to drastically reduce misdiagnoses in minority populations, thereby bettering outcomes among the most underserved populations. Click here for a project summary.
Justin Herrera (D’24; Anthropology) was mentored by Dr. Alka Dev. Along with Scholar Uma Alagappan (D’23; Quantitative Social Science), Justin co-authored a systematic review to identify the type and prevalence of interventions designed for pregnant and postpartum people with disabilities since 2012. As part of this team, Justin and Uma reviewed initial results of the search strategy, vetted articles for deeper reading, and helped to extract data and write parts of the paper. Click here for a project summary.
Alan Ngouenet (D’25; Industrial Engineering & Operations Research) was mentored by Dr. Alka Dev; he used extracts from the American Community Survey data to create a gender-based measure of area-level deprivation. Alan was a critical support person in conditioning the data to calculate the geographic distribution of household- and individual-level data across U.S. counties. Click here for a project summary.
Carolyn Yee (D’25; Biology & Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies) was mentored by Prof. Inas Khayal. She joined the Sustainable Health Lab in Spring 2023 and worked on examining current health equity improvement efforts at hospitals throughout the United States delivering palliative care to cancer patients. The collected and subsequently analyzed data will inform current and future initiatives, resources and efforts being implemented to address cancer care delivery disparities and provide additional overall understandings of healthcare systems and inequities to improve healthcare decision-making as a whole. Click here for a project summary.