InterAction

 I have a wide variety of international and domestic public health and development experience both as a government employee and in government contracting.

Most recently, I was a program officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development where my work included a wide variety of responsibilities including writing country operational plans, mission management reports, reports to Congress and working with contractors and collaborating partners. My most recent overseas assignment was to Honduras where I worked in the USAID Strategy and Program Support Office. Among other highlights of my career, I played a lead role in a major evaluation of a worldwide HIV/AIDS prevention and control project, carried out according to a Presidential Management Initiative. My work on this project included traveling to Cambodia and Thailand where I interviewed project participants. I also traveled on temporary duty status to Yemen where I wrote the USAID mission’s first operational plan. I have experience in USAID business practices and have completed diploma courses in evaluation, economic development, project and program management, land tenure, and cognizant technical officer training. In addition, I worked on an evaluation of the Whitman-Walker HIV/AIDS Clinic in Washington, D.C. I retired from USAID in February 2010 and am available for full time or consulting assignments.

Prior to joining USAID I served for over five years as director of the Diabetes Today National Training Center Project, a CDC-funded project with the goal of fomenting the creation of new community-based prevention and control activities around the U.S., as well as in Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and, in collaboration with the Pan American Health Organization, on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border. This was a bilingual project that resulted in numerous successful community-based projects aimed at reducing the burden of diabetes. My responsibilities included all phases of project management, from startup to closeout. I hired and supervised staff, led curricula design in English and Spanish, presided over and facilitated training activities in the field, and served as the point of contact with our CDC client.

My experience also includes work in a State health department in Kansas as well as local health and community development projects in New York. Among the latter was a project designed to provide outreach and education to Hispanic physicians treating HIV/AIDS patients. I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in a Mayan community in Guatemala where I completed a long list of projects that are described in detail in my resume. I am fluent in Spanish at the FSI 4/3 level.

My educational background includes a master’s degree in public health from the City University of New York, a bachelor’s degree in social welfare from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, a diploma program in health management at Columbia University School of Public Health and some doctoral level course work in anthropology from the State University of New York at Albany.