MPH candidate · UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health
I'm a second-year MPH candidate focused on global health implementation and health systems. My work has centered on HIV/AIDS and WASH, with experience spanning USAID's Office of HIV/AIDS, FHI 360, and the Water Institute at UNC. This summer I was in Hanoi, studying how the 2025 PEPFAR funding transition disrupted HIV prevention services at a clinic affiliated with Hanoi Medical University. That work received a 2026 Practicum Excellence Award from Gillings.
Before Gillings, I earned dual degrees from Duke University and Duke Kunshan University in global health and public policy, including three years living and studying in China. That experience — watching how policy written in one place lands in another — still shapes how I approach this work.
My thesis used natural-language processing to analyze more than 2,300 USAID policy documents, tracing how U.S. global health priorities shifted across administrations. Since then I've worked on the implementation side: HIV/AIDS subawards at USAID, hygiene programs at FHI 360, and WASH in healthcare facilities at the Water Institute at UNC.
I'm most interested in roles that bridge research, implementation, and donor strategy — whether that's with an implementing partner, in public service, or building something new. I finish my MPH in May 2027.
Graduate Research Assistant, Graduate Funding and Information Center
Writing and sending Funding and Fellowships Friday, the center's iContact newsletter to about 8,000 subscribers; rebuilt its email templates. Also running funding searches and database reviews, one-on-one funding consultations with students, and funding workshops for fellowship cohorts and classes.
Graduate Work-Study Student, Communities of Practice
Coordinating webinar production for two global professional communities (1,000+ members across 50+ countries), from stakeholder outreach and communications campaigns to event logistics; increased average WASH in healthcare facilities webinar attendance by 50%. Helped launch the Circuit Riders Community of Practice, including washcircuitriders.org, a subscriber base grown from 0 to 297, and a bimonthly webinar series.
MPH Practicum Intern, Global Health
Designed and ran an interrupted time series analysis of seven years of clinic records on PrEP services before and after the 2025 PEPFAR/CDC funding transition. Built the R pipeline from raw REDCap exports, reconstructing the clinic's own Stata reporting definitions, and presented findings to clinic leadership and U.S. CDC staff in Hanoi.
Stanback Fellow, Research & Knowledge Management — WASH
Developed resources for the Just Ask microlearning initiative and wrote a ChatGPT-assisted drafting procedure with citation verification and technical review steps. Developed Global Handwashing Day campaign materials and reviewed a hand-hygiene research summary for accurate interpretation of findings.
Student Trainee, Bureau for Global Health — Office of HIV/AIDS
Conducted compliance reviews for $2M+ in HIV/AIDS subawards across 20+ country teams under PEPFAR. Coordinated technical inputs for Country Operational Plans and key population programming under EpiC, and helped design the Office-wide orientation for incoming COP coordinators and medical officers.
Marketing Consultant
Leading donor communications for a regional greenway nonprofit, contributing to $120k+ in annual fundraising. Designing and distributing 4,000+ donor newsletters annually.
Practicum Excellence Award, 2026
Interrupted time series analysis of seven years of records from a Hanoi sexual health clinic after free PrEP medication ran out in the 2025 PEPFAR/CDC funding transition. Fitted July 2025 counts were 64% below the model's counterfactual for visits, 67% for dispensing, and 69% for new PrEP starts, and the ratio of new starts to new HIV-negative testers fell from 83% to 39%. Delivered a findings memo, a reproducible analysis repository with an automated audit script, and the clinic database's first data dictionary.
Most Creative Solution
Diabetes risk estimation tool built on a logistic regression model of CDC BRFSS data. I designed the participant-facing survey flow and front end and deployed the Node.js prototype. Presented to NC DHHS leadership, leading to a proposed UNC–NC DHHS collaboration to develop and validate it further.
Signature Work thesis analyzing 2,300+ USAID policy and program documents with BERTopic topic modeling to compare global health and development priorities across the Trump and Biden administrations. Found disease-specific bilateral programming dominant under Trump, with multilateral engagement and reproductive health expanding under Biden.
1st Place, HackDKU 2025
Full-stack clinical trial matching platform built with React and Flask, featuring a custom eligibility algorithm querying 1,000+ trials from ClinicalTrials.gov. Built and deployed in 24 hours during HackDKU 2025.
“It’s easy to write something that runs once, on my data, in July. It’s harder to make something that someone else can pick up six months from now, add new records to, and adapt when the questions change.”
From Serious work, silly coffee: wrapping up in Hanoi · Global Health blog · Oct 2026 — Read the post
Profiled by NPR on how federal hiring freezes and policy realignments reshaped career plans for the class of 2025.
NPR · Education — Read the story