PEOPLE 
FACULTY, STUDENTS, STAFF, & COLLABORATORS

Margaret Bourdeaux, MD, MPH

Margaret Bourdeaux, MD, MPH is the Founding Director of the Health Security Policy Academy at Mass General Brigham in the Division of Global Health Equity. Her global health work focuses on governing health systems and enhancing their resilience in crisis and conflict affected states. Currently, she chairs the Harvard Global Health Institute’s Scholarly Working Group on Threatened Health Systems and is the co-PI on a NATO Science for Peace and Security funded project, Enhancing the Resilience of Health Systems to Hybrid Warfare that aims to help NATO members and partner countries prepare their civilian health systems for hybrid warfare.  

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She is faculty in Harvard Medical School’s Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. She is a pediatrician and internal medicine physician by training and holds an MPH from Harvard Chan School of Public Health and an MD from Yale Medical School.  She has published extensively on health security policy in forums like Health Affairs, Foreign Policy, Health Security, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and NPR.  She has presented her work in multiple forums, including the Munich Security Conference, World Health Assembly, and World Health Summit.

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Dr. Bourdeaux has served as a faculty affiliate at BKC since 2020 and was a faculty fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s  Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs from 2019-2022, when she directed the Digital Pandemic Response project during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the course of the pandemic she worked with dozens of jurisdictions across the US on outbreak investigation and response, which  led her to launch the Transmission Focused Outbreak Response and Mitigation (TRANSFORM) project that aims to restructure the US public health enterprise such that it resources and positions local medical and public health practitioners to quickly detect and respond to emerging health crises in their communities.  She has partnered extensively with the National Governors Association and the CDC in this work and serves on the Steering Committee of the Massachusetts Consortium for Pathogen Readiness (MassCPR), a consortium of medical schools and research institutions devoted to bridging the divide between medicine and public health and advancing pandemic research.

Pavlo Kovtoniuk

Deputy Minister of Health of Ukraine in 2016-19, founder of the policy think tank, the Ukrainian Healthcare Center, consultant in health financing and health system reform for WHO and World Bank, senior lecturer at National University "Kyiv-Mohyla Academy" (Ukraine)

Diana Rusnak

Diana Rusnak is a policy and research analyst at the Ukrainian Healthcare Center (UHC) in Kyiv, Ukraine. She holds a master’s degree in Healthcare Management from the Kyiv Mohyla Academy (2017) and has been actively engaged in Ukraine’s health system reform agenda since 2018. She began her policy career at the Ministry of Health, where she worked on communicating reform strategies and addressing priority health policy issues across the Ministry’s portfolio.

Following her government service, Rusnak transitioned to the nonprofit sector, continuing her research on healthcare transformation. Her work examined the implementation and outcomes of national health reforms, as well as COVID-19 response strategies and their system-level impacts.

Since joining UHC in 2021, she has led analytical work on a range of priority health policy issues. Her research has supported initiatives to strengthen healthcare services for Ukrainian veterans, advance rehabilitation system reform, and promote evidence-based decision-making during the pandemic.

In response to Russia’s full-scale invasion, Rusnak has documented attacks on healthcare infrastructure, assessed their consequences, and contributed to international advocacy efforts, including engagement with the UN Human Rights Council. Her current work focuses on analyzing wartime health system impacts, planning for post-war recovery, reintegrating temporarily occupied territories, and developing healthcare financing and system reconstruction policy recommendations.

Cecilia Needham

Cecilia Needham is currently completing her Masters in Medical Science in Global Health Delivery at Harvard Medical School. Her research focuses on malnutrition programs in Malawi, in partnership with Partners in Health. Cecilia has over ten years experience living, working, and volunteering in Haiti in a number of capacities. In undergraduate, she studied International  & Global Studies and Global Health at Middlebury College. Her thesis focused on how state and non-state actors interactions' affect health systems, and thus, health outcomes. Cecilia is very interested in how health systems disruptions and conflict affect health security, patient outcomes, and access to healthcare as a human right. 

Leanne Friedrich, PhD

Leanne Friedrich, Ph.D. is a scientist and software engineer with a background in materials science who has spent the bulk of her career in public service. She is an organizer with TBFighters, a global activist collective devoted to ending the structural causes of tuberculosis.

Nahid Bhadelia, MD, MALD

Dr. Nahid Bhadelia is the founding director of the Boston University Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases and a board-certified infectious diseases physician, serving as Associate Professor at the BU School of Medicine. A recognized leader in global health security and pandemic preparedness, she previously served on the White House COVID-19 Response Team (2022–2023) as Senior Policy Advisor for Global COVID-19 Response, where she coordinated U.S. interagency efforts on global vaccine donations and led policy for Project NextGen, a $5 billion HHS initiative to develop next-generation vaccines and therapeutics for pandemic-prone coronaviruses. She also served as interim Testing Coordinator for the White House MPOX Response.

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Dr. Bhadelia co-founded and directs BEACON, an open-source outbreak surveillance network. From 2011–2021, she helped build and led the Special Pathogens Unit at Boston Medical Center, a state-designated Ebola Treatment Center, and held leadership roles at BU’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories. She has deployed to multiple Ebola outbreaks in West and East Africa and led DoD-funded viral hemorrhagic fever research in Uganda.

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Her research spans operational preparedness, medical countermeasures, diagnostics, infection control, and workforce training. She advises WHO, the U.S. government, and the National Academies, and teaches global health security at Tufts’ Fletcher School. Her work appears in Nature, Science, New England Journal of Medicine and other prestigious journals, as well as in press including Washington Post, and The Atlantic and Time magazines. Her work has been featured in documentaries by National Geographic as well as NOVA. She was an NBC/MSNBC medical contributor between 2020-2022 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Olena Dmytrenko

Olena Dmytrenko is a junior analyst at the Ukrainian Healthcare Center (UHC) in Kyiv. Her work focuses on understanding global healthcare systems and using these insights to produce analyses and inform policy recommendations. Before that, Olena also worked at Deloitte for the Health Reform Support project. She holds a degree in Political Science and International Relations.

K. J. Seung, MD

K. J. Seung, MD is a physician and public health leader with more than two decades of experience designing and leading large-scale global health and outbreak response programs, with a focus on translating evidence into policy and practice in TB, HIV, antimicrobial resistance, and pandemic preparedness. He has held senior leadership roles in major international initiatives, including serving as co-leader of endTB, a project that expanded access to new tuberculosis drugs and generated some of the largest observational studies and clinical trials of drug-resistant TB treatment worldwide. He has worked closely with major funders such as Unitaid and USAID on the design, financing, and oversight of complex, multicountry programs.

His research and policy work has been published in leading journals and outlets including The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, Clinical Infectious Diseases, PLOS Medicine, The New York Times, and The Atlantic.

Michelle Pratt

Michelle Pratt is a research assistant to the Working Group. Currently she is a Master's program student at Royal Roads University in British Columbia, Canada (Master of Disaster and Emergency Management). Michelle's expertise is in Human Ecological approaches to emergency management, and she holds a professional Human Ecologist designation. Currently, she works as an emergency management and business continuity advisor as well as being an intern to Richard Serino. Michelle has assisted with several projects, and previously was an unpaid advisor to the National Academy of Sciences Special Committee on Best Practices for Assessing Mortality and Morbidity Following Large Scale Disasters. Prior to entering the world of Emergency Management Michelle studied Human Ecology at the University of Alberta, and worked as a statistician for the Alberta Respiratory Syncytial Virus program. She is an avid researcher, writer, and public speaker

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Vincent Lin is Associate Director of Health Policy and Advocacy at Partners In Health, where he leads federal global health policy analysis and supports grassroots and coalition advocacy. At Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health, he studied tuberculosis microbiology and policy and worked with the late Dr. Paul Farmer on Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History (2020).

Syra Madad, Ph.D.

Syra Madad, DHSc, MSc, MCP, CHEP, is a leading public health executive and internationally recognized epidemiologist and biosecurity advisor focused on biopreparedness, infectious disease response, and health system resilience. She serves as Chief Biopreparedness Officer at NYC Health + Hospitals, the nation’s largest municipal healthcare system, where she leads biopreparedness strategies across the full emergency management cycle: prevention, preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery. She is also the Principal Investigator at the Institute for Diseases and Disaster Management, advancing international initiatives that strengthen global health security and improve readiness for high-consequence pathogens. Known for translating complex science into practical protocols, she helps health systems and governments prepare for and respond to biological threats. Madad is a trusted national expert who serves on the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity and participates in National Academies forums on preparedness and microbial threats. She is a fellow at The New York Academy of Medicine and the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She also serves as the Public Health Editor-at-Large for The New York Academy of Science. Her work has earned major honors for scientific excellence and crisis leadership. She has taught microbiology, epidemiology, and biosecurity at various academic institutions, published 100+ works, and appears frequently in major media and documentaries.

Ashton Wollett, MSW, LCSW

Ashton joined DGHE in January 2022 and previously held

the Programs and Operations Director position at Courageous Sailing, a small nonprofit in Boston dedicated to providing equitable access to outdoor learning opportunities and reducing achievement gaps in Boston Public Schools. In her role at DGHE, Ashton oversees the administrative aspects of a large research portfolio focused on health equity. She also assists with the

delivery of the division’s educational programs and manages research projects as needed. Ashton has over ten years of program management experience, which has primarily focused on risk management, youth development, and community engagement. Ashton earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Auburn University and her Master of Social Work degree from

Florida State University.

Angeline Ferdinand, PhD, MPH

Dr Angeline Ferdinand (PhD, MPH) established and leads the Policy and Evaluation Unit at the Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity (University of Melbourne), operating across the Centre for Pathogen Genomics, WHO Collaborating Centre for Antimicrobial Resistance and the MDU Public Health Laboratory. Dr Ferdinand’s work is nationally and internationally recognised as bringing together implementation science, health systems evaluation and a focus on health equity to the development of public health responses to infectious disease, antimicrobial resistance, One Health and pathogen genomics. Dr Ferdinand has led development of the WHO global pathogen genomics monitoring and evaluation tool to support countries in building capacity to integrate genomics into their surveillance systems and evaluate progress towards the WHO Global genomic surveillance strategy for pathogens with pandemic and epidemic potential.  She has provided technical advice to the WHO and Asia Development Bank regarding regional development of pathogen genomics networks and capabilities and leads the Evaluation and Implementation Aim of AusPathoGen, a national program to further Australian public health application of pathogen genomics.  Dr Ferdinand is the Doherty Institute Policy Mentor for the UK’s Fleming Fund, providing training in evidence-based policy making and program evaluation to professionals in human and animal health sectors in Pakistan, Bhutan, Timor Leste and Nepal to support antimicrobial resistance policy; and leads the evaluation of the Antimicrobial Resistance and One Health Fleming Fund Regional Grant for Southeast Asia.