The Method Section: Recent Episodes
Eric Green
I talk with psychiatrist Dr. Vikram Patel. Vikram holds several titles, including the Pershing Square Professor of Global Health and the Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He's also Professor in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. In addition to his academic appointments, Vikram is a co-founder of Sangath, an Indian non-profit committed to improving health across the life span. We discuss his trial of the Healthy Activity Program in India and how you measure constructs like depression.
I talk with Dr. Wendy O'Meara, Associate Professor of Medicine and Global Health at the Duke Global Health Institute and the Duke School of Medicine, and Visiting Lecturer at Moi University in Kenya. Wendy is an expert on malaria and implementation science and serves as the co-field director for research at AMPATH, a partnership between Moi University, Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital, North American universities, and the Kenyan Government. We discuss her experience designing and conducting epidemiological research as an engineer, her approach to implementation science, and her thoughts about where good ideas come from.
I talk with Dr. Paul Garner, Professor at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. Paul is an expert on evidence based medicine. He oversees the Center for Evidence Synthesis for Global Health, serves as one of the co-ordinating editors of the Cochrane Infectious Diseases Group, and he helped to established the well-known and respected Cochrane Collaboration in the 1990s.
I talk with clinical epidemiologist Dr. Salim Abdulla from the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania. Salim is an expert on malaria, and he has worked on studies of diagnostics, insecticide treated nets, drugs and vaccines, and conducted field trials from Phase I to Phase IV.
I talk with Dr. Daniel Halperin, author of the book "Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome It", co-authored with journalist Craig Timberg. Daniel is an epidemiologist and medical anthropologist with extensive experience studying HIV and AIDS as an academic, combatting its spread as the Senior HIV Prevention and Behavior Change Advisor at USAID, and consulting over the years with international partners to influence policy. He also had a front row seat to a fascinating piece of history in the fight against HIV and AIDS.