CAMRE People

Group photo of camre staff, faculty, and students

The CAMRE team includes SPHTM faculty, staff, students, and postdoctoral fellows.

Dr. Thom Eisele is a Professor with joint appointments in the Departments of Tropical Medicine and International Health and Sustainable Development, and is the Director of the Center for Applied Malaria Research and Evaluation in the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. His research focuses on malaria epidemiology and evaluating malaria control and elimination strategies (NCBI Bibliography: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/bibliography/1Ly_xtnqtR2Ax/bibliography/public/). Areas of expertise include malaria epidemiology, evaluating the impact of malaria control/elimination strategies, and measurement of malaria intervention coverage and malaria health outcomes. His current research focuses on measuring the impact of malaria elimination strategies in Zambia and Haiti with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Prof Eisele has led or been involved with generating evidence of the impact of novel malaria control and elimination tools using large-scale community randomized controlled trials. These including evaluating the impact of insecticide treated mosquito nets in Kenya, and more recently in Zambia, malaria mass test and treatment, mass drug administration (MDA) for malaria, and a new malaria vector control tool attractive toxic sugar baits. Prof Eisele has served as a member of the Roll Back Malaria Monitoring and Evaluation Reference Group (since 2003), the WHO Global Malaria Program (GMP) Technical Expert Group on Surveillance Monitoring and Evaluation, the Malaria Eradication Research Agenda (I and II), the ACTWatch advisory board, the Improve Coverage Measurement core advisory group, the Child Health Epidemiology Reference Group, as well as numerous evidence review groups (ERGs) for the WHO GMP, including those for case management, mass treatment strategies, MDA, malaria in pregnancy and malaria burden estimation.

Joe Keating, PhD

Joe Keating is a Professor in the Department of Tropical Medicine. His research focuses on malaria and vector-borne disease epidemiology, as well as evaluating infectious diseases control programs. Areas of expertise include epidemiology, vector ecology, evaluation and measurement, and data analysis. Dr. Keating has strong ties in Ethiopia, where he currently runs a malaria epidemic detection surveillance system. Dr. Keating is an active member of the Military Infectious Disease Research Program (MIDRP) vector biology review panel, and a technical advisor for the Eritrea National Malaria Control Program.

Josh Yukich, PhD

Josh Yukich is an Associate Professor in the Department of Tropical Medicine. His area of research focuses on preventing and eliminating malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. His main area of work involves the use and collection of surveillance data for malaria and the measuring of malaria transmission in intervention suppressed areas. Dr. Yukich was trained in epidemiology, public health and health economics, and much of his work is centered around the synergy of these topics. He also regularly applies economic evaluation techniques to aid countries and international donor organizations in efficient use of resources for malaria control programs. Dr. Yukich is member of the World Health Organization – Global Malaria Programme Vector Control Technical Expert Group (VCTEG) and the Innovative Vector Control Consortium (IVCC) – Expert Scientific Advisory Committee for New Paradigms in Vector Control (ESAC-3).

Ruth Ashton, PhD

Ruth Ashton is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Tropical Medicine. Trained in epidemiology, she has worked on malaria and neglected tropical disease implementation research in east Africa and south-east Asia. Her current work focuses on measuring the impact of malaria control and elimination programs, with a particular interest in surveillance approaches for epidemic-prone and elimination settings.

Katherine Andrinopoulos, PhD

Katherine Andrinopoulos is an Associate Professor in the Department of International Health and Sustainable Development. Her research focuses on the translation of evidence based interventions to real world settings and scale-up for malaria and HIV. She was a Co-Investigator on a formative research study to inform the Malaria Zero elimination efforts in Haiti. She is the Principal Investigator on several projects focused on the HIV clinical cascade for key and priority populations. She is the Director for the Doctoral Programs at the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and teaches courses on international health and the social determinants of HIV. She uses qualitative and quantitative methods.

Valerie Paz-Soldan, PhD

Valerie Paz-Soldan, based in Lima Peru, is a social scientist and Associate Professor at the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. She focuses on social sciences as applied to vector-borne disease prevention and control, with a specific focus on studying behaviors that may put people at risk, or alternately reduce their risk, for vector-borne disease infection. Her research in Peru currently focuses on various areas: 1) examining the role of human movement in affecting people’s relative risk for acquiring and transmitting dengue, which includes measuring human movement, and controlling for the effect of movement on evaluations of interventions for dengue prevention; 2) assessing acceptability and use of new interventions to control dengue transmission (insecticide treated curtains and insect traps); and 3) examining strategies to increase participation in vector control strategies for Chagas control.

Paul Hutchinson, PhD

Paul Hutchinson is a health economist and Professor at the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His areas of expertise include econometric methods for impact evaluation, economic evaluations (e.g., cost-effectiveness analyses, cost-utility analyses), and health systems strengthening. He has led and been involved with numerous program impact evaluations, including serving as the PI for an External Evaluation of the Southern Africa Regional Social and Behavior Change Program, the Northern Uganda Health Integration to Enhance Services Project and the Private Sector Partnership-One Project. He has led the design and implementation of large-scale population and health surveys in numerous countries across Africa, the Middle East and Asia. He currently teaches a doctoral-level course on advanced evaluation methods for observational data. He has nearly 20 years of experience working with Ministries of Health, universities, USAID, and UN Agencies (World Bank, UNICEF) in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, South Asia and the Middle East.

Adam Bennett, PhD

Adam Bennett has joined the Global Health Group at the University of California at San Francisco (BennettA@globalhealth.ucsf.edu). Dr. Bennett continues to collaborate closely with the members of the Center on assessing the impact of malaria elimination efforts in Zambia and other related malaria research projects.

Thom Druetz, PhD

Thom Druetz is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Tropical Medicine at Tulane University, as well as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine at the School of Public Health, University of Montreal. Dr. Druetz continues his close collaboration with Tulane University and the Center. Trained in public health and epidemiology, he has a particular interest in evaluation of interventions under routine program conditions of implementation. He has worked on research projects centered on malaria control interventions and access to healthcare. His current work includes operational research projects in Haiti to help inform the malaria elimination strategy in Hispaniola. He is also conducting research on the implementation and effects of the user fee abolition policy in several West African countries.

In Memoriam Donald Krogstad, MD (1943-2020)

Professor Don Krogstad was a Henderson Professor in the Department of Tropical Medicine. He was internationally recognized for his work in malaria and other tropical diseases and for the development and training of young investigators. Dr. Krogstad was the former Chair of the Department of Tropical Medicine and the founding and former Director of the Tulane University Center for Infectious Diseases. He had more than 200 publications, was a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and the Infectious Diseases Society of America, former president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, former Secretary for the Medical Sciences for the American Association for the Advancement of Science and had served as a Fulbright Scholar in Mali.

Staff