Announcing the 2024-25 Non-Resident Global Health Politics Fellows

The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future is pleased to announce its 2024-25 Global Health Politics Fellows. The inaugural group of Non-Resident Fellows is comprised of five PhD students or postdoctoral fellows who were selected by the Global Health Politics Workshop’s (GHPW) Steering Committee.

Fellows will participate in GHPW events throughout the course of the academic year and receive feedback and mentorship from a Steering Committee member on a research paper in the field of global health politics.

The 2024-25 Global Health Politics Fellows are:

Mohammad Khamsya Bin Khidzer (Mentor: Gowri Vijayakumar)

Mohammad Khamsya Bin Khidzer is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Institute for History at Leiden University. His research focuses on race, diabetes, and public health in late colonial and postcolonial Singapore, examining how diabetes emerged as medically, culturally, and politically salient in society. He has published research on race, diabetes, and public health in Singapore, and co-authored work comparing how ethnic communities in Vietnam and Singapore interpret data from population genetics research. As a researcher at Leiden University, Mohammad continues to investigate the afterlives of colonial medicine in Southeast Asia with a particular focus on the science of body shapes and disease risk, while also working on his book manuscript on the construction of Asian Diabetes in postcolonial Singapore.

Dereck Hamunakwadi (Mentor: Kim Yi Dionne)

Dereck Hamunakwadi is a PhD candidate at Virginia Tech under the Center for Public Administration and Policy (CPAP). He has relevant practical experience in qualitative methods in health policy research. His research focuses on global health politics, particularly global health agenda setting, health priorities, and policy implementation in low and middle-income countries. His dissertation research centers on the Africa CDC.

Aida Hassan (Mentor: Kevin Croke)

Aida Hassan is a PhD student at Queen Mary University of London. Working at the intersection of Global Health and International Relations, her research interests are primarily centred on postcolonial and critical perspectives of global health governance. Her PhD research currently focuses on the limits of liberal, state-centric norms of global health governance in protracted conflicts, utilising a comparative analysis of health emergencies in Syria and Yemen.

Vyoma Sharma (Mentor: Siri Suh)

Vyoma Dhar Sharma is a postdoctoral fellow at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, Georgetown University. She works on the O’Neill-Lancet Commission on Racism, Structural Discrimination, and Global Health, which aims to diagnose racism in global health and identify promising anti-racist strategies. Vyoma holds a DPhil in International Development from the University of Oxford. Her doctoral thesis examined the ideas and processes that sustain the ‘Reproductive & Child Health’ (RCH) paradigm as the dominant view of women’s health in developing countries.

Swati Srivastava (Mentor: Joseph Harris)

Swati Srivastava is a researcher and doctoral candidate at the Heidelberg Institute of Global Health, Medical Faculty and University Hospital, Heidelberg University. She has a background in clinical dentistry and global health and is trained in quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods research. Her research interests include the thematic areas of health policy and politics, health care access and utilization, health insurance systems and universal health coverage; and mixed methods evaluation techniques. Swati’s doctoral research focused on the policy design and implementation of the PM-JAY health insurance scheme in India and she wishes to pursue this further with the Global Health Politics Workshop Fellowship.