Michelle Niescierenko, MD, MPH is a Pediatric Emergency Medicine physician, director of the Global Health Program at Boston Children’s Hospital and Health Specialist with Avenir Analytics. The Boston Children’s Global Health Program works to improve child health globally through partnerships for clinical quality improvement, education, research and advocacy in over 30 countries around the world. ??Avenir Analytics health focus on high quality humanitarian health systems interventions.

She has experience in pediatric care and program development in China, Bolivia, Lesotho, Guatemala, Liberia, Indonesia, Uganda, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Syria. In Liberia she provided pediatric humanitarian aid in the immediate post-conflict setting partnering local remaining infrastructure to US academic institutions for the last 10 years. Through these partnerships, sustainable programs for health system rebuilding including physician education and care for vulnerable children were developed in Liberia. During the 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak she lead the Liberian hospital public health response utilizing a rapid deployment of training done by local healthcare workers. This work continued into Liberia’s recovery phase with implementation of a national program for hospital quality improvement and emergency care training. Her particular areas of interest are in the provision of healthcare in humanitarian settings through system development, the development of emergency care systems for children as well as the role of children in humanitarian crises.

Samantha Rosman, MD, MPH is a Pediatric Emergency Physician at Boston Children’s Hospital. Samantha’s primary global health partnership has been at Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Kigali (CHUK) through the Rwanda Human Resources for Health Program, a large grant devoted to Rwandan health system strengthening. She has been working and teaching in Rwanda since 2013 and has supported the strengthening of the Rwandan pediatrics residency, launched a simulation based pediatric resuscitation curriculum there, and mentored a variety of pediatric resident research projects. In collaboration with her Rwandan colleagues Samantha’s research has focused on developing a novel Pediatric Early Warning Score for use in Resource-Limited settings as well as in simulation techniques to improve pediatric resuscitation performance in resource-limited settings. In 2016 Dr. Rosman completed the Commonwealth Fund Mongan Fellowship in Minority Health Policy at Harvard Medical School and her MPH in Health Management at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is very interested in global health equity and the impact of racism and colonialism on global health. She co-founded and is co-directing a new Global Health Equity Curriculum for global health fellows at Boston Children’s Hospital which was successfully piloted this year with the global pediatrics fellows and global nursing fellows. She has facilitated a bidirectional education exchange between the University of Rwanda Department of Pediatrics and Boston Children’s Hospital and is working to develop a long-term partnership between BCH and Rwanda. Samantha has been active in health policy and advocacy since medical school. During residency and fellowship, she served on the American Medical Association Board of Trustees, helping lead their efforts on advocacy for covering the uninsured serving as the national spokesperson for the “Voice for the Uninsured Campaign”. She continues to serve on the American Academy of Pediatrics delegation to the American Medical Association and serves on the Massachusetts Medical Society’s Antiracism Task Force as well as the Society’s Committee on Public Health. Samantha and her husband live in Jamaica Plain (Boston) with their children ages 9 and 11 who consider Kigali their second home and speak French far better than she does, having lived in Rwanda for much of their early childhood.

Laurel Gabler, M.D., D.Phil., MSc, is committed to improving pediatric emergency care in underserved communities. She received her B.A. in Psychology from Stanford University. During her undergraduate years, Laurel had the opportunity to work in Ecuador, through Children International, assisting a pediatrician running a program to address malnutrition. Upon graduation from Stanford, she worked in Tanzania as an HIV educator for the NGO, Support for International Change. Following this experience, Laurel was awarded the Luce Scholarship, and spent the year in rural Thailand learning about Thai traditional medicine and working on a farm that grew medicinal plants for the local hospital. Before attending and receiving her M.D. from Harvard Medical School, Laurel earned a M.Sc. in Global Health Science and a D.Phil. in Public Health through the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Her research focused on health-seeking behaviors and health service delivery in rural Nepal, where she lived for two-and-a-half years, funded through a Fulbright fellowship. Laurel continued her global health work during medical school through the Harvard South Asia Institute, where she helped community health workers in rural India devise community empowerment projects. While matriculating at CHOP for residency, Laurel had the opportunity to return annually to Tanzania to teach local interns, run a weekly rehabilitation clinic, and create pediatric dosing and reference cards that are now utilized throughout the hospital. After residency, Laurel worked as a Pediatrician in the Emergency Department at CHOP for a year before beginning her Pediatric Emergency Medicine fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital. She hopes to continue to work at the intersection of public health, clinical medicine, and health education both domestically and internationally.

Sonia grew up moving a lot between cities in Asia and the U.S. By college, she had moved eight times and had lived in Chengdu, Singapore, Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Washington, D.C. Her medical training has allowed her to explore the northeast: New York, Philadelphia, and now Boston. Some things she loves about Boston already include how bike-friendly it is and how easy it is to access New England’s mountains, state parks, and beaches. She is excited to be part of the International Pediatric Emergency Medicine combined fellowship at Boston Children’s.

Jean Junior was born and raised in Michigan. She did residency at the University of California, San Francisco, as part of the Pediatric Leadership for the Underserved (PLUS) track, which she completed in 2019. Jean spent 2019-2020 serving the Oglala Lakota people as a full-scope pediatrician working with the Indian Health Service in rural South Dakota. She started her fellowship in pediatric emergency medicine in 2020 as part of the global health track. Jean has engaged in global health endeavors since 2006, and has worked in countries such as South Africa, Bangladesh, Mexico, Kenya, and Liberia. She has strong interests in poverty alleviation policies and programs in the US and abroad, including tax policy and unconditional cash transfer programs.

David Mills is a pediatric emergency medicine physician and fellow in global health at Boston Children’s Hospital. He is an Instructor in Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and an MPH candidate at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Mills is a member of the Children in Crisis working group at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and has served as a research team member for the World Health Organization’s Global Health Cluster COVID-19 Task Team. Dr. Mills’ work focuses on the intersection of health and human rights, health care provision in humanitarian contexts, health systems capacity building in resource-limited settings, and contextualizing the political and historical determinants of health of marginalized populations. He has 10 years’ experience working in the occupied Palestinian territories and has experience in Liberia, Uganda, India, Rwanda, and Brazil. Dr. Mills’ recent work includes the development and implementation of a pediatric resuscitation and early warning scoring system initiative in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, development of a pilot program aiming to provide remote pediatric subspecialty consultation to providers in several provinces in Iraq, and undertaking research evaluating the technical and operational challenges and good practices in delivering covid-19 response in six humanitarian settings around the world. Dr. Mills is the recipient of the 2020 Harvard Radcliffe Accelerator Workshop grant which seeks to build consensus on and develop actionable recommendations for addressing the upstream drivers affecting Palestinian health.