Global Health

Biography
Catherine Fort is a senior program manager in health finance and economics with over 20 years of experience designing, implementing, and evaluating reproductive health, family planning, and maternal and child health programs in the public and private sectors. As deputy director in RTI's Center for International Health, Ms. Fort currently oversees RTI's health governance work, including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded Decentralization and Integrated Health Services (Twubakane) project in Rwanda and the Strengthening Local Governance for Health project in the Philippines. She also manages the USAID Strategic Alliances for Social Investment Projects in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, where RTI is helping forge public and private partnerships to finance health and education programs for poor communities. Having worked in more than 25 countries, Ms. Fort has extensive experience assisting public and private sector partners to develop their capacity to plan, finance, and manage health services and programs. Read More…

Biography
Barbara Kennedy is vice president of International Health at RTI. She has more than 30 years of experience in the strategic design and management of international development programs, including long-term assignments in Kenya, Peru, Cape Verde, and Paraguay. Ms. Kennedy has senior management skills in public private partnerships and alliance building, capacity development of local institutions and national programs, health and human rights, conservation of natural resources, building civil societies through more participatory local government planning, and health care planning in developing countries. She has strong public health leadership skills and expertise in reproductive health and family planning, health care reform, decentralization, and adolescent and youth programs. Ms. Kennedy has extensive experience in the design, management, and evaluation of international public health programs in over 25 countries in Africa, Latin America, and Central Asia, as well as special skills in team building, participatory strategic planning and priority setting, donor leveraging, and staff development. Read More…

Biography
Mary Linehan is a senior international health specialist in the International Development Group and operations director of the Neglected Tropical Disease Control Program. Ms. Linehan has more than 18 years of international work experience in program management; technical assistance to ministries of health; and research for maternal, infant, and child health and nutrition. Special areas of expertise include program development and management, training, infectious disease surveillance and field research, malaria and neglected tropical diseases, and local capacity development. Ms. Linehan was instrumental in the design, implementation, and early success of the Nepal National Vitamin A Program. She has extensive Asia regional experience, including 12 years of residence in Nepal, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. Read More…

Biography
Henri (Harry) Roovers is a senior project manager and local governance expert with more than 20 years' experience implementing urban development, local governance, and poverty reduction projects in Asia and West Africa. He has prepared participatory development plans and investment programs for infrastructure and services, and capacity building and training programs for local governments in Thailand, Vietnam, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Sierra Leone. From 1998 to 2006, Mr. Roovers directed RTI's regional office in Indonesia, supporting the acquisition of new projects and the financial and administrative management of program implementation. Mr. Roovers has managed large interdisciplinary project teams for the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Asian Development Bank. He is currently chief of party of the USAID-funded Local Governance for Health project in the Philippines, a 5-year program to strengthen the management and delivery of basic health services in over 550 local governments. Read More…

Biography
As vice president of Global Health at RTI, Dr. Doris Rouse manages the coordination of diverse disciplines to address major global health needs. Currently, she is the project director for two Gates Foundation grants: Venture Investment Technical Assistance to develop new products for global health, and Maternal and Neonatal Directed Assessment of Technology to identify and advance opportunities for improving maternal and neonatal health in low resource settings. Dr. Rouse is the principal investigator for a program funded by the National Institutes of Health to commercialize new treatments for tuberculosis. She has extensive experience in forming public and private consortia, such as the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development. Dr. Rouse serves on the Global Health Advisory Committee for the University of North Carolina School of Public Health. In her tenure as director of the Center for Technology Applications at RTI, she managed technology assessment, outlicensing, and technology sourcing projects for numerous government and corporate clients. Read More…

Biography
Rachel Royce, PhD, MPH, senior research epidemiologist, has over 20 years' experience in the design and conduct of epidemiology and public health research with a focus on HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and maternal child health. She joined RTI in 2001 after 8 years as a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of Epidemiology. Dr. Royce has a strong background in research methodology and the epidemiology of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, sexually transmitted diseases, and preterm delivery. She has served as principal investigator and co-investigator on several research projects and has written numerous publications. She has directed and collaborated on grants, cooperative agreements, and contracts funded by a variety of sources, including the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Fulbright Commission. Dr. Royce is the principal investigator and project director for the North Carolina Site of CDC's Tuberculosis Epidemiologic Studies Consortium (TBESC). Read More…

Biography

Wendee Wechsberg, Ph.D., is director of the Substance Abuse Treatment Evaluations and Interventions (SATEI) research program at RTI. She has more than 20 years of clinical experience and has directed outpatient drug-free, methadone, and residential substance abuse treatment programs. Dr. Wechsberg has devoted her career to applied research, using both quantitative and qualitative methods, to develop and test the efficacy of HIV prevention interventions among different populations of substance abusers. She has served as principal investigator/project director on studies with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Dr. Wechsberg also serves as a consultant and advisor for various national studies and international studies. She has been conducting international research in South Africa with at-risk substance abusing women since 2001. She has published in the areas of gender and ethnicity, outreach, HIV risk, and women substance abusers. Read More…

Biography
Karl Whitney, PhD, is regulatory program director in the Global Health Technologies program of RTI's International Development Group. Dr. Whitney has more than seven years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry, specializing in clinical and regulatory aspects of pharmaceutical development, as well as in target identification and characterization, and lead compound identification. Dr. Whitney has helped prepare investigational new drug applications, clinical and nonclinical final study reports, pre-new drug application (NDA) packages, annual reports, orphan and fast-track designation applications, and NDA marketing application materials prepared in the electronic common technical document format. Dr. Whitney was trained in pharmacology, neuroscience, and neuroimmunology while completing his PhD at Duke University. His postdoctoral fellowship at GlaxoSmithKline provided exposure to fundamental and high-throughput nuclear hormone receptor biology, molecular biology, gene regulation, and genomics/expression research. Dr. Whitney's technical areas of expertise include tuberculosis, neuroscience, neuroimmunology, nuclear hormone receptor biology, and various genomics research techniques. Read More…

Biography
Godfrey B. Woelk, PhD, is a senior research epidemiologist in the international health program within RTI's Statistics and Epidemiology unit. Dr. Woelk has broad experience in international public health, especially in the prevention and mitigation of HIV/AIDS. He has over 15 years of experience in project design, execution, and analysis in HIV prevention and care, maternal health, hypertensive diseases of pregnancy, child health, and health systems research. During the past 10 years, Dr. Woelk has been involved in community-based HIV and sexually transmitted disease prevention trials, facilitating trials in health care research and examining the barriers and facilitators to the uptake of findings into policy. His other areas of experience include home-based care for people living with AIDS, local government responses to HIV/AIDS, and orphans and vulnerable children. Dr. Woelk is an editorial board member of AIDS and Behavior and has refereed for Sexually Transmitted Diseases and other journals. Read More…