Dave Washburn is clinical associate professor and director of the MHA program in the Department of Health Policy and Management. He received both his Doctor of Science and Master of Science from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Prior to his academic career, he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras, and worked as a strategic and capital health care planner for the San Francisco VA Medical Center and then Stanford Health Care.
Nathan Morrow, PhD. is an Associate Professor in IHSD and has taught a summer institute on Food Security and Resilience in Italy for 15-years. His research leverages geospatial tools for open and citizen science to investigate policy relevant action for environmental justice, human and planetary wellbeing, and food system resilience. He is currently leading NASA-funded open science capacity development to advance environmental justice in the Gulf South.
Rie Yotsu is a dermatologist, and with her interest in global health, has cultivated her expertise in skin infections. She especially has longstanding track record of her contributions to the field of skin-related neglected tropical diseases, or the ‘skin NTDs’. Skin NTDs is a set of NTDs which manifest with skin symptoms, such as leprosy, Buruli ulcer, yaws, lymphatic filariasis, mycetoma, and scabies.
W. Susan Cheng is a trained infectious disease epidemiologist, with a diverse background in STI research, pandemic preparedness, mental health, health disparities, and maternal and child health. Her current research has focused on the effects of social determinants of health on anxiety and depression, maternal mortality, and childhood wellness, including nutrition and dietary allergies.
Dr. Christine Arcari is the Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. Her role is to provide leadership and vision in academic affairs for the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. She received her PhD in epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and an MPH in Community and Family Health from the University of South Florida, College of Public Health. Arcari has an extensive record of teaching, mentoring and promoting student success in public health.
Dr. Fuster’s work examines the contextual factors influencing food practices and the policies and interventions implemented to improve them, with a focus on Latin American communities, as presented in her book, Caribeños at the Table: How Migration, Health, and Race Intersect in New York City. Expanding on this work, she is currently focused on food environment policy implementation research and evaluation.
Tonya R. Thurman,'s MPH, PhD, research focuses on establishing an evidence-base for programs serving highly vulnerable children in sub-Saharan Africa. She resides in South Africa as Country Director for the Tulane International office while directing evaluation and intervention development initiatives to guide USAID Southern Africa’s investment in programs for orphans and other vulnerable children and youth. Her projects entail rigorous evaluations, monitoring activities, capacity building, and diverse dissemination strategies to ensure that learning improves service delivery.
I am an associate professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. I also have appointments in the Department of Economics and the Murphy Institute for Political Economy at Tulane.
Dr. Gretchen Clum's research has focused on exposure to stressful events, mental health, and health outcomes (e.g. sexual risk behavior, substance use) in women and adolescents. She has worked primarily with vulnerable populations, including women who have experienced violence and HIV positive adolescents. Her goal is to understand mechanisms linking stressful life events, mental health, and poor health outcomes in vulnerable populations in order to develop and test evidence-based interventions to ameliorate the negative health effects of stressful life events.
