Gene Bukhman, MD, PhD, is a cardiologist and cultural anthropologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is the Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Integration Science in Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Program in Global Noncommunicable Disease and Social Change at Harvard Medical School. He is also an Associate Professor of Medicine and an Associate Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School
Between 2010 and 2015, Dr. Bukhman was the senior technical advisor on noncommunicable diseases to the Rwanda Ministry of Health. Over the past 15 years, he has argued that for those living in extreme poverty, NCDs are best understood as part of the “long tail” of global health equity that demands a new “science of integration.” He has translated this critique into practical delivery strategies such PEN-Plus (the Package of Essential Noncommunicable Disease Interventions–Plus). These strategies are now impacting the lives of thousands of people living with severe childhood-onset conditions such as type 1 diabetes, sickle cell disease, and rheumatic and congenital heart disease in more than a dozen countries.
He is the author of more than 125 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters that apply a range of methodologies from ethnography and archival research to epidemiology and mathematical modelling to identify solutions to the problem of “NCDI Poverty.”
Dr. Bukhman was the lead author and co-chair of the 1996–2020 Lancet Commission on Reframing NCDs and Injuries for the Poorest Billion. He is currently Co-Chair of the 27-country NCDI Poverty Network launched in December 2020 to support implementation of the Lancet Commission’s recommendations.
In 2023, Dr. Bukhman received the World Heart Federation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Global Cardiovascular Health.
Dr. Maureen Okam Achebe is the Assistant Director for Hematology Integration at the Center for Integration Science. Dr. Achebe is Clinical Director of Hematology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Clinical director of Hematology Services at Dana Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI). In these roles she devises strategies for clinical operations improvements and oversees all classical hematology patient care at BWH and DFCI. She is the director of the Comprehensive Sickle Cell Disease Center at BWH that delivers state-of-the-art care to adults with sickle cell disease (SCD). Dr. Achebe is deeply involved in the care of individuals with SCD in the US and internationally. She is the co-chair of the data subcommittee of the American Society of Hematology Consortium on newborn screening for SCD in Africa (CONSA) that seeks to demonstrate the benefits of screening and early intervention for SCD underway in seven countries in sub-Saharan Africa. She has represented ASH and CONSA at 2019 World Health Assembly side meeting in Geneva and at WHO Afro regional meetings in Brazzaville, Congo to advance support for the care of individuals with SCD worldwide. Dr. Achebe serves as a commissioner on the Lancet Non-Communicable Disease and Injuries (NCDI) Nigeria Poverty Commission as the sickle cell disease expert and guides the identification and prioritization of policies, interventions and integrated delivery platforms to effectively address and reduce SCD burden in the country. She is actively involved in clinical trials and translational research at BWH and was an investigator in the development of two of the most recently US FDA-approved drugs for SCD. She is Co-Director of the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology ICM: Hematology Clinic for Harvard Medical students.
Dr. Achebe is a graduate of University of Port Harcourt medical school, specialty training in Hematology and Medical Oncology at Yale School of Medicine and is a graduate of Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health. She is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Alma Adler is the Research and Monitoring and Evaluation Director for the Center for Integration Science (CIS) at Brigham and Women’s Hospital since 2018. Dr. Adler began her career as a bioanthropologist receiving her PhD in 2005, but later received an MSc in Public Health/Developing Countries, Epidemiology Stream from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Before joining CIS, Dr. Adler was an Assistant Professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, where she was a member of the Centre for Chronic Diseases and the Centre for Maternal, Adolescent, Reproductive, & Child Health. Other positions Dr. Adler has held include systematic review specialist at the Cochrane Heart Group and Science Officer at the World Heart Federation. Dr. Adler’s research focuses on three areas: Implementation science, mixed methods evaluations of complex interventions, and evidence synthesis. She has led implementation research projects in nine countries on three continents. Dr. Adler has over 50 publications and numerous media appearances.
Dr. Chantelle Boudreaux is focused on understanding how to build better health systems, specifically how to merge a country’s epidemiologic profile with their existing resources to best respond to current and anticipated health needs.
At the Center for Integration Science, her research focuses this question at the hospital level. This requires an understanding of the optimal clustering of tasks among providers, and a consideration of the interfaces both within and outside of the health system, to better understand how diverse clinical skills and interdisciplinary roles, programs, and service tiers can influence the delivery of healthcare services and population health outcomes.
Chantelle completed her doctoral studies at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. She also holds Masters degrees from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Johns Hopkins Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.
Paula Brewer Byron is the Communications Director for the NCDI Poverty Network. She has spent most of her communications career in the fields of medicine, public health, and human rights. Most recently she worked at Virginia Tech, first as communications director for a startup medical school and biomedical research institute, then as senior editor at the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. For the previous dozen years, she was editor of Harvard Medical School’s magazine, and before that she served as communications director for what was then the Harvard AIDS Institute, an initiative of the Harvard School of Public Health. One of Byron’s principal specialties is publications. In addition to editing Harvard Medicine, she has served as editor of Illumination, an annual magazine at Virginia Tech; Carilion Medicine, the biannual magazine of a regional health system; Silent Spring Review, a publication focused on the environmental causes of breast cancer; Baobab, the daily newspaper for an AIDS in Africa conference in Senegal; and a range of publications for the AIDS Prevention Initiative in Nigeria, the Reebok Human Rights Awards Program, and the Harvard AIDS Institute. Byron has also edited three books on AIDS in Africa and coauthored a book on human rights heroes around the world. She earned her bachelor’s in English at Williams College and her master’s in Asian Studies at the University of Michigan.
Matt Coates is a Research Specialist with the Center for Integration Science in Global Health Equity. He began working with the Lancet Commission on NCDs and Injuries for the Poorest Billion in 2016, conducting analyses for the commission report and supporting national commission work. He has contributed to research about the burden of NCDIs by socioeconomic levels, risk factors for these conditions, the availability of health services for NCDIs in low- and lower-middle-income countries, and potential impact of scaling up coverage of interventions to prevent and manage NCDIs. His general interest is in quantitative modeling to project population impact of policies and interventions, incorporating equity considerations.
Matt is currently pursuing a PhD in Epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He earned an MPH in Global Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, where he contributed to demographic estimates and estimates of disease burden attributable to alcohol consumption for the Global Burden of Disease project from 2013 to 2016.
Christa Cepuch, MPH, attended the faculty of pharmacy at the University of Toronto. Following a year’s residency program, she started her career as a clinical pharmacist in internal medicine at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. She has since gained over 20 years of experience in global access to medicines research, policy, and advocacy, both with Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) and Health Action International Africa. She received her MPH from the School of Public Health at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Most recently she was the pharmacist coordinator at MSF’s Access Campaign, with a focus on the quality of medicines and access to medicines for people living with diabetes and hypertension. She is based in Geneva.
Katia Domingues (MPH) is the PEN-Plus Program Manager for the NCDI Poverty Network at the Center for Integration Science in Global Health Equity. She received her MPH from Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health with two certificates in Monitoring & Evaluation of International Programs and Humanitarian Health. She also holds a bachelor’s degree in Community Health from Tufts University. In addition to her work with PEN-Plus, Katia is a part-time epidemiologist at a local health department in Massachusetts.
Prior to joining the NCDI Poverty Network, Katia served as a COVID-19 Case Investigator Lead for the Portuguese-speaking division of the Internal Language Line at the CTC, a joint program of PIH and the state of Massachusetts. Simultaneously, she was on the JHU COVID-19 Training Initiative team as a student intern and helped create training modules to be used by local boards of health on pandemic response. She also served in the Peace Corps as a Community Health Services promoter in Chicumbane, Mozambique, and helped train health workers at the district hospital in data collection of infectious diseases. While in Mozambique, she trained Mozambican community-based organizations on grant writing skills and successfully acquired two grants to start a health literacy project and community library initiative in the village she served.
Outside of work, Katia likes to go on walks, travel, drink tea and spend time with her family and friends.
Gina Ferrari joined the team in 2019 as a research fellow after completing a dual Master of Science in Nursing/Master of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests focus on the implementation of training and mentorship programs facilitating behavioral approaches to chronic disease management for clinicians caring for patients in rural areas of low- and lower-middle-income countries (LLMICs). She has a background in diabetes technology research and has spent over 10 years working at diabetes camps for children in the U.S. and abroad. Gina currently practices as a clinician and diabetes educator at a Federally Qualified Health Center in San Diego, California caring for adults with type 1, type 2, and gestational diabetes. Gina’s passion for promoting and providing equitable access to high quality diabetes care stems from her own type 1 diabetes diagnosis over 10 years ago.
