Karen Elaine Stella Hamre, MPH
Current course of study: Doctor of Philosophy in Epidemiology, University of Minnesota School of Public Health

Congratulations to Karen Hamre, who has been awarded a Fogarty fellowship for 2013-14. Learn more about her project and goals, in her own words:

Highland areas (>1,500m above sea level) are targeted for malaria elimination due to their unstable transmission patterns. Unlike in malaria holoendemic regions where partial immunities to malaria are built-up and sustained through years of infectious mosquito bites, populations in highland areas are susceptible to epidemics as their immune responses wane due to the highly seasonal and sporadic nature of transmission.

Dr. Chandy John and his colleagues at the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI), Dr. John Vulule and Dr. George Ayodo, have been conducting research in the highland areas of Kipsamoite and Kapsisiywa in western Kenya for over a decade. 

nterrupting local transmission is the first step towards the elimination stage.

During my 11 months in Kisumu, Kenya, as a Fogarty Global Health Scholar, I plan to utilize the rich data Dr. John is collecting on anthropogenic (e.g., roof structure, wall material, bednet usage, numbers in household), demographic (e.g., age, gender), entomologic (e.g., vector density and species), environmental (e.g., rainfall and temperature), and spatial (e.g., global positioning information of households, schools, forests, swamps) factors to study the epidemiology of malaria across time and transmission patterns in the same study population and location.

I intend to contribute to the understanding of the epidemiology of malaria in this highland area by making comparisons of predictors of malaria risk before and after interruption of transmission.

Specifically, I aim to determine where clustering of incidence occurs (i.e., identify 'hot spots' of malaria) after the period of interruption, and evaluate whether these clusters and related predicting ecologic risk factors correlate with those reported during epidemic and non-epidemic months before interruption.

Understanding how malaria interruption may affect several predictors of risk in highland settings will help inform future targeted control and elimination strategies.

For more information on the Fogarty fellowships, visit the Global Peds website

For the past 4 years, Global Pediatrics faculty, Maria Kroupina, has provided research mentorship to physicians in training from Maastricht University, Netherlands. Today's entry is a guest post from our 2013 research intern, Liza Toemen. In her words:

"My name is Liza Toemen, I'm a final year medical student from Maastricht University, The Netherlands. I was born in Oirschot, a town near Eindhoven in the south of the Netherlands. A long time ago I decided I wanted to become a doctor, and luckily for me things went as I had dreamed.

"I went off to Maastricht to study, a place at the most southern point of the country.

"During my medical bachelor years I had the opportunity to do some volunteering with Aviva, a South-African organization. I spend 4 weeks working in a children's home in Mfulene, one of Cape Town's townships. We took care of about 30 children, mostly playing with but also bathing, feeding and preparing food for these children, some of whom had no permanent foster or adoptive family to go home to. Afterwards I went traveling in South Africa. I liked this so much that I grabbed every opportunity during my masters years to go abroad. 

"My first internship was an elective of 10 weeks, which I decided to do in paediatrics in Mulago Hospital; Kampala, Uganda. During my stay I also visited a hospital in Gulu, in the north of Uganda, a very impressive experience, since it was my first practical experience in the hospital. 

"After this internship my normal internships at all the different hospital specializations started. Most of those I did in the Netherlands, but I did ophthalmology in Belgium and gynaecology and obstetrics in Cape Town (yes, again Cape Town, you can never see too much of South Africa!)

"In the Dutch medical curriculum you do 3 bachelor years, mainly theory and 3 master years, mainly practical. The last year of the masters degree consists of 18 weeks' clinical internship and 18 weeks of research.

"I've just finished the clinical part in March--18 weeks on a general pediatric ward of a middle-sized hospital. The research part is why I have come to the University of Minnesota. 

"I'll be doing 18 weeks of research at the U of M and helping Dr. Kroupina in the Development and Transition Clinic. I'm assisting with data analysis on her Kazakhstan study and will also write a paper. Later, I will also spend time on the growth study. 

"My goals I'll finish halfway August and when I get home a couple weeks after that I hope to be able to call myself a MD."

Tiny Tim and Friends is a non-religious NGO that operates in Lusaka, Zambia, primarily in service of children with HIV.  Program director, Tim Meade MD, provides an exemplary learning experience for our residents who elect to serve in Zambia during their internationanl electlve.  Learn more

L to R: Chuck Schubert (Cincinnati Children's Hospital), Nicole St. Clair (Medical College of Wisconsin), Cindy Howard (University of Minnesota), Jacquelyn Kuzminski (MCW), Sabrina Butteris (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Laura Houser (UW-Madison)

In April 2013, Cindy Howard and colleagues presented a poster: Global Child Health Educators: Local Collaboration To Optimize Global Education at the 2013 annual meeting of Association of Pediatric Program Directors (APPD).

The poster described the planning, organization and scholarly products that have resulted from our collaborative efforts as part of the Midwest Consortium of Global Health Educators. Formed in 2009, the Consortium brought together global health education programs with residency tracks from:

• Cincinnati Children's Hospital
• May Clinic College of Medicine
• Medical College of Wisconsin
• Northwestern University
• Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital
• University of Minnesota
• University of Wisconsin - Madison

Our institutions share competencies, knowledge assessments and curriculum resources as part of an innovative way to achieve effective global health education across pediatric residency programs.

Pediatric Global Health Track resident, Kristina Krohn, was published in the April issue of Minnesota Medicine with a piece she co-wrote about the importance of educating new immigrants on 911 and the emergency medical system in the U.S.

Said Krohn, "I started this article with Pat Walker over a year ago, and can see how much I've grown since I started writing this. It is fun to see how journalistic and scientific writing can meet."

Read the full article

During Tina Slusher's March 2013 trip to Cambodia, she observed at Angkor Children's Hospital's Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. While there as an observer, she was asked to do some informal teaching in their PICU and some formal teaching for their residents, consultants and staff.