Fellows

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.

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.

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.

Esmeralda Abreu-Jerez (D’25; Geography and Quantitative Social Science), is mentored by Dr. Erika Moen and Dr. Alka Dev. She is working on a project titled “Disparities in receipt of obstetric/gynecological preventive care: An All of Us cohort study” that aims to identify disparities in receipt of obstetric/gynecological (OB/GYN) preventive care and determine barriers to care access. Addressing such barriers for reproductive age women is critical to ensure equitable access to screenings, counseling, testing, and contraceptives. The research team is leveraging 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 are examining factors associated with self-reported receipt of an OB/GYN appointment from 2018-2022. 

Priyanshu Alluri (D’26; Biophysics) is mentored by Dr. Wesley Marrero. Priyanshu is working on a project titled “Socially Fair Clustering Algorithm of Mental Health Profiles of Students in the United States.” This work is 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 aim 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.

Justin Herrera (D’24; Anthropology) is mentored by Dr. Alka Dev. Along with Scholar Uma Alagappan (D’23; Quantitative Social Science), Justin is co-authoring 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. The paper is submitted to the journal Disability and Health.

Alan Ngouenet (D’25; Industrial Engineering & Operations Research) is mentored by Dr. Alka Dev; he is using extracts from the American Community Survey data to create a gender-based measure of area-level deprivation. Alan has been a critical support person in conditioning the data to calculate the geographic distribution of household- and individual-level data across U.S. counties. The next steps are to analyze this measure of gender-based deprivation in relation to birth outcomes.

Carolyn Yee (D’25; Biology & Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies) is mentored by Prof. Inas Khayal. She joined the Sustainable Health Lab her sophomore year, in Spring 2023. She is working on collecting data on current hospital health equity efforts through a scoping review to analyze and understand the range of current initiatives, resources, and efforts being implemented to address healthcare disparities across diverse organizations of healthcare providers. This data is intended to inform current and future implementations of initiatives combatting cancer care delivery disparities and provide additional overall understandings of healthcare systems and inequities to improve healthcare decision-making as a whole.