Kendra LeSar is a public health professional with extensive experience planning, implementing, and evaluating public health programs. Her research interests include sexual and reproductive health, adolescent health, emerging infectious diseases, and community-driven public health interventions. She is deeply committed to innovative teaching methodologies, student mentorship, and the integration of equity-focused approaches in public health education. Dr. LeSar is passionate about bridging research, practice, and education to advance public health outcomes locally and globally.

Dr. Allouch is an epidemiologist with a background in community-based interventions, implementation science, and epidemiologic methods. Her research interests include cardiovascular disease epidemiology, maternal and child health, health disparities, and international health. She has a keen interest in developing effective, community-based interventions that can be translated into public health policy to improve population health. Additionally, Dr.

Dr. Kristin Banek is an Infectious Disease Epidemiologist. Her current research examines antimalarial treatment effectiveness and adherence in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. More broadly, she is interested in optimizing the implementation and effectiveness of malaria interventions and measuring their impact on disease prevalence and transmission. Dr. Banek earned her BA in Biology and German from St. Olaf College and her MPH in International Health and Development from the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.

Dr. Czarny received her MS degree in biotechnology and a PhD in clinical molecular genetics. Her master’s research project was focused on gene response to corticosteroid-induced apoptosis. During her PhD, she was a recipient of the Finnish CIMO scholarship to support her study of genetic changes affecting skeletal development in patients with bone dysplasias at the Department of Biochemistry, Collagen Research Unit, University of Oulu, Finland, in the laboratory of Dr. Leena Ala-Kokko. She completed her post-doctoral training in the laboratories of Dr. Leena Ala-Kokko and Dr.

Jillian Torres is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management. Her academic interests and areas of expertise are around healthcare strategic planning, quality improvement, change management and analytics.

Melissa Goldin Evans is a Community Health Sciences researcher in maternal and child health who specializes in reproductive healthcare access and equity issues. She is faculty within the Department of Social, Behavioral, and Population Sciences and affiliated with the Mary Amelia Center for Women’s Health Equity Research (MAC). Her academic training and research experiences include examining multiple factors related to contraceptive access among low-income women in Louisiana utilizing both qualitative and quantitative methods.

Lauren E. Futrell Dunaway, PhD, MPH, RD, LDN is a Registered Dietitian and Public Health Researcher with public health teaching, research, and evaluation experience. She is an Assistant Professor in the SPHTM Undergraduate Public Health Studies Program, currently working to expand nutrition courses and degree offerings. Before this role, she was a Professor of Practice in the Tulane School of Professional Advancement’s Kinesiology program where she developed robust and interactive undergraduate and graduate online courses.

Dr. De Anda-Duran is a cardiovascular risk and brain health epidemiologist with a diverse training background. She studied medicine at Universidad Autonoma de Baja, California, in Mexico and became a medical doctor in 2016. She obtained a master’s in Public Health and Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 2020. Before joining the Tulane faculty, Dr.

Dr. Samuel Kakraba’s research centers chiefly on the development and implementation of efficient computationally-driven pipelines aided by robust data science, statistical, mathematical and biostatistical predictive machine learning algorithms like neural networks, deep learning, support vector machines, k-nearest neighbors, random forests, Naïve Bayes, and others, in R statistical software, Python, SAS, and others, for estimation, prediction, and inferences into complex high-dimensional relationships in many fields like pharmaceutical sciences, public health, among others.

Shalean Collins is an applied nutritionist and dietitian who uses mixed methods to evaluate the consequences of resource insecurity for vulnerable populations. Her research integrates training in clinical nutrition and public health and uses a biocultural approach to study the interactions between social, behavioral, physiological, and environmental determinants of health.