Three students from the IntraHealth-UNC Fellows Program completed their fellowships with IntraHealth International last month, marking the thirteenth year of the partnership between IntraHealth and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC).  

This year’s fellows, who came from UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health and the UNC School of Nursing, spent the summer working side-by-side with global health professionals at IntraHealth. They analyzed strategies for measuring how health workforce interventions affect client health, the global health investment landscape, and how IntraHealth’s SupCap project in Uganda increased contraceptive use among postpartum couples.

Meet the 2022 IntraHealth-UNC Summer Fellows

Dana Bjuro, a student in the UNC School of Nursing, worked with IntraHealth’s strategic information, digital health, and health workforce development teams to identify ways to predict client health using workforce development indicators. By the end of her fellowship, she had drafted a research protocol and helped IntraHealth understand which indicators and variables affect client health outcomes and thus the quality of health services. 

Mary Peter is a physician from Nigeria. She has worked in primary care for over three years and is now pursuing a master’s degree in public health at the Gillings School of Global Public Health. She is particularly interested in health workforce advocacy, global health, and climate change, so she spent her summer with IntraHealth’s policy and advocacy team researching investment opportunities for the global health workforce.

Sam Shutt graduated from UNC with a bachelor’s degree in 2021 and is now pursuing a master’s degree in public health at the Gillings School of Global Public Health. He is interested in working in global health to develop evidence-based interventions to combat noncommunicable diseases and wants to help improve access to health care both in and outside of the United States. This summer, he helped determine if communication between couples and contraceptive use in Uganda increased due to IntraHealth’s SupCap project.

Since 2010, IntraHealth and UNC have teamed up to offer graduate students hands-on experience in the field of global health at an international nongovernmental organization—and to strengthen IntraHealth’s work by inviting fresh perspectives and ideas from students.

Fifty-one fellows have now completed the program. Some of their past projects have focused on:

• digital health
• HIV
• gender
• family planning
• health systems strengthening
• health communications
• monitoring and evaluation
• respectful maternity care
• health workforce data
• noncommunicable diseases

All graduate students enrolled at UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health or the UNC School of Nursing are eligible to apply to this highly competitive program. Applications become available each year in the fall.