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Senam Immana Aku Ametsitsi is a physician from Ghana. She obtained her medical degree at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana, where she spearheaded a United Nations Students Association initiative, impacting 200 children battling cancer. Through fundraising events and her collaborative partnerships, she orchestrated free therapy, screening, and awareness campaigns for these children. Senam also successfully secured funds and managed a two-phase cervical cancer awareness project that benefited over 500 women. Before pursuing an MPH/MBA at Johns Hopkins, she managed an under-resourced mother-baby unit, leveraging her professional network to secure timely care for severely ill neonates in tertiary institutions.

Senam is committed to health equity and aims to harness expertise in policy development, business strategy, and management to foster greater healthcare accessibility. She seeks to permeate the pharmaceutical space to create and deliver medications that cater to the unique needs of diverse and marginalized populations.

Carissa White Dukes is a DrPH student pursuing the custom concentration track with a focus in pharmacoepidemiology and mental health. She is a dedicated pharmacoepidemiologist having worked in industry since graduating from Indiana University Richard Fairbanks School of Public Health with her Master of Public Health (MPH) degree in 2015. She has a passion for improving mental health outcomes through rigorous research and data analysis and is driven by the potential of pharmacoepidemiology to inform and improve psychiatric drug safety and efficacy. In her current role she analyzes large-scale patient data to understand patient populations, identify trends, risks, and opportunities for precision medicine in mental health. She is committed to advancing the understanding of mental health conditions and the factors that influence their prevalence, treatment, and outcomes. Her research efforts have spanned a wide range of topics, from investigating the safety and efficacy of psychotropic medications to examining the impact of social determinants on mental health disparities.  With a Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) degree, she hopes to gain the academic background and practical experience necessary to tackle complex issues at the intersection of pharmaceuticals and epidemiology in mental health. She also plans to use her acquired skills to contribute to the advancement of precision psychiatry for improved outcomes.

Joseph Hwang is a general internal medicine fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He completed his M.D. at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and internal medicine residency at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He also received M.Sc. in epidemiology and has studied prescription drugs and health outcomes in chronic diseases. His research interests include pharmacoepidemiology, diabetes, and HIV.

Corey Joseph is a PhD student in the Department of Epidemiology. Over the past three years, he led global evidence generation activities for the approval and reimbursement of pharmaceutical drugs in the ophthalmology, gastroenterology, and oncology therapeutic areas at Takeda Pharmaceuticals. Before Takeda, Corey held roles of increasing responsibility in the real world evidence group at IQVIA, and in the upper aerodigestive oncology group at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He obtained his MPH from the Boston University School of Public Health and his Bachelors of Science in Public and Community Health from the University of Maryland. His research interests are in the intersection of causal inference and machine learning methodologies.

Dr. Joseph Kannarkat is an internal medicine resident. He has previously published articles on drug regulatory and health policy in venues like The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and The Brookings Institution. His research interests include studying the regulation, use, and reimbursement of therapeutics and the role of regulatory agencies (i.e., FDA and CMS) in these processes. Prior to his medical training, he worked with England’s National Health Service in Cambridgeshire to study health system restructuring and explored innovative approaches to healthcare provision in Kenya. He received an MPhil in Public Policy as a Kanders Churchill Scholar at the University of Cambridge and a Master of Global Affairs at Tsinghua University as a Schwarzman Scholar. Joseph completed his undergraduate education in economics and neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh.

Michael is currently a part-time MPH student and a Bloomberg American Health Initiative Fellow, with a focus area in Addiction and Overdose.  He has spent most of his career as a pharmacist for CVS Health in the Detroit area.  Most recently, Michael has transitioned to a pharmacy advisor within their corporate office, working with a product development team in pharmacy operations.  In this role he helps research, develop, and implement new programs and initiatives with an aim to achieve better health outcomes for patients and communities. His research interests include pharmocoepidemiology and health behaviors as they relate to expanding the role of the community pharmacist in identifying and preventing addiction and overdose. 

Dr. Banda Khalifa is an award-winning physician and a doctoral (Ph.D.) student in the department of epidemiology who works as a vaccine regulatory and policy analyst at the Johns Hopkins International Vaccine Access Center (IVAC).  He was an MPH & MBA Johns Hopkins Sommer Scholar and a Center Scholar focused on epidemiology and biostatistics with a certificate in Pharmacoepidemiology from 2018 to 2020. His MBA emphasis was in health systems, finance, and management, and he graduated as a Beta Gamma Sigma (International Business Honor Society) member. Dr. Banda has led and managed teams in government and non-governmental organizations through transformations that resulted in the organization's go-big objective being realized. He joined the Ghana Armed Forces in 2014 and won the Chief of the Defense Staff Award by Ghana's president after commissioning as the overall best graduating cadet. He led the medical team for Ghana's Aviation team on four UN Peacekeeping missions. Dr. Banda worked as a manager for the Covid-19 response program within the Baltimore City Health Department.  Dr. Banda formerly served as the vaccine and health delivery advisor for the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. Dr. Banda received the 2022 alum impact award at the University of Ghana School of Medicine and Dentistry's 60th-anniversary celebration. His research interests include vaccination science policy, effectiveness, and outcomes research.

Zarah Khondoker is a graduate student at the Johns ��ѻ��ý, reproductive health activist & journalist, TEDx Speaker, and Host of The Hormonal Podcast. With guests featured in The New York Times, Teen Vogue, and ELLE, her podcast focuses on changing the definition of the word “hormonal” and the various contexts in which hormones are attributed to reproductive health, including fertility and disorders. As an aspiring scientist, she is also the Founder of Sangone Health, a startup that is a social + solution network to address hormonal reproductive disorders, with a biomaterials-based, non-invasive solution to test for them. Sangone Health has been recognized by the National Science Foundation and placed as a Top 8 USA Finalist at the Hult Prize competition, also referred to as the “Nobel Prize for Students”.

Sophia is a ScM candidate in Epidemiology with a concentration in cancer research. She previously worked in the Count Me In initiative at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she coordinated several cancer research projects. She was primarily interested in The Colorectal Cancer Project, where she supported clinical, genomic, and microbiome data collection from medical records and participant samples. This experience cultivated her interest in applying research methods to large clinical datasets, including EHR and claims data, to build real-world evidence on cancer risk factors, as well as therapy utilization, safety, and efficacy. Now at Johns Hopkins, she is interested in applying epidemiological methods and statistics to cancer pharmacotherapy research to evaluate the safety and comparative effectiveness of novel targeted therapies and off-label therapy utilization.

Randall Kuffel is a PhD student in the Department of Epidemiology. Prior to joining BSPH, he worked as a research associate at the San Francisco VA Health Care System in the Department of Psychiatry. His research has focused on the epidemiology of late-life suicide in the US veteran population, with emphases on antipsychotic medications, frailty, and PTSD.

Emaan Rashidi is a PhD student in the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns ��ѻ��ý, where she also earned her MHS in Epidemiology in 2021. Before beginning her doctoral training, she worked as a Senior Consultant Epidemiologist at IQVIA, leading the design of pharmacoepidemiologic studies for regulatory use. She has applied rigorous epidemiologic methods across a range of therapeutic areas, including oncology, gastroenterology, and rheumatology. Her current research focuses on leveraging observational study designs and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning tools to enhance the validity and impact of real-world evidence.

Dr. Sun received her DrPH and MHS from the Johns ��ѻ��ý, an MSc from the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, and an MBA from the University of Hong Kong. With over a decade of experience in the medical industry, including roles in pharmaceutical marketing and strategic development for medical devices, she has gained extensive practical knowledge in drug safety and efficacy, particularly in ophthalmological, cardiovascular, and respiratory diseases. Shifting her career focus from China to the U.S. and global markets, she is now specializing in pharmacoepidemiology.

Her research interests stem from her industry experience, where she witnessed the complexities of ensuring drug safety and efficacy across diverse markets. Dr. Sun aims to investigate the utilization, effectiveness, and safety of medications and medical devices, with a strong emphasis on real-world evidence to mitigate risks associated with pharmaceutical treatments. Her research interests include examining the use of medicines to treat heart, lung, and blood diseases in the United States. She is committed to applying her expertise to improve patient outcomes and quality of life.

Lijuan Zeng is a PhD student in Epidemiology. She previously worked at Statistics Collaborative, Inc. for several years as a biostatistician, providing statistical services regarding study designs and analyses of clinical research to pharmaceutical and biotech companies. She also served as an independent reporting statistician for Data and Safety Monitoring Boards for mainly industry-sponsored phases 2 and 3 clinical trials. Lijuan obtained her MHS in Epidemiology from Johns ��ѻ��ý and her Bachelor of Science in Pharmaceutical Science from Fudan University. Her research interest includes design and conduct of clinical trials, benefit-risk assessments, and pharmacoepidemiology.

Jinqi Zhan is a Ph.D. student in the Clinical Trials and Evidence Synthesis Track at the Department of Epidemiology. She completed her MPH (Chronic Disease Epidemiology) at Yale University and worked in a biotech company for several years before starting her doctoral training. She gained experience in clinical trial regulatory submissions, Institutional Review Board applications, data monitoring, and patient recruitment in the US and Asia through executing an international oncology trial. For her future research, she hopes to explore adaptive design clinical trials, precision medicine, and regulatory science in cancer drug development.