Colleen is a double alumna of George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health, where she graduated with an MPH in Community-Oriented Primary Care in 2019.  During her undergraduate years, she volunteered at Children’s National Medical Center as a social services advocate for families. Colleen spent time in Kenya in 2016 studying urbanization, health, and human rights, and completed a research project there on the management of HIV and tuberculosis. As a graduate student, she worked in staff training and development for GW Campus Recreation, where she was responsible for the hiring and training of over 100 student employees. Colleen also worked with GW’s Honey W. Nashman Center for Civic Engagement and Public Service as the Program Coordinator for Civic House, a first-year living learning program for students interested in getting involved in the DC community. As a registered EMT, Colleen volunteered over 500 hours on an ambulance for a local fire department, and regularly taught community CPR classes in Maryland. Colleen was the recipient of the Academic Excellence in Public Health award in 2017, as well as the Nashman Prize for Community-Based Participatory Research in 2019 for her study on knowledge and perceptions of youth sports-related concussions in a local non-profit. She is excited about returning to Africa and continuing her commitment to public health as the Integrated Primary Care Support Fellow for Integrate Health in Kara, Togo!

Emily, born and raised in Houston, TX, graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in Neuroscience. While at Wellesley, Emily completed a multi-year internship at the Center for Addiction Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital where she conducted clinical research examining neurocognitive recovery following sustained cannabis abstinence in adolescents and young adults. In her spare time, she mentored students from a Boston housing project through the Mission Hill After School Program, and also participated in multiple global health projects in rural Nicaragua. After finishing school, Emily wanted to experience working in the nonprofit sector and moved to Honolulu to serve as an Americorps VISTA at Hawaii Children’s Action Network. In this role, she designed and oversaw a community outreach program to engage stakeholders, community partners, and donors, and also launched and coordinated a volunteer program. Emily is passionate about creating sustainable solutions to support and empower vulnerable populations. She believes in the power of robust research and preventive strategies to improve health outcomes in under-resourced global regions. For fun, Emily enjoys hiking, surfing, and climbing with friends. She is excited to serve and learn in her post as a Research Fellow with the UNC Malawi Surgical Initiative.

Alumni Update:

Lambert is currently interning with congressman Adam Smith (WA9) as Payne Fellow. In mid-August, he will be moving to Duke University for a master’s in water resources management. 

Fellow Bio:

Ngenzi Lambert graduated from Washington State University with a degree in Environmental Science with a focus in water resource management and a minor in Geographic Information System. He wants to use his research experience and his knowledge about the African continent to help local communities in Africa conserve and manage water resources. Lambert moved from Republic of Congo to Kent, Washington with his family as a refugee from the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. He has been conducting his undergraduate research with Dr. Alex Fremier looking at how land use patterns in Ghana and Burkina Faso affect sediment accumulation by using remote sensing programs. Lambert was a McNair scholar and a Doris Duke Conservation program fellow. These programs have helped prepare Lambert to pursue his passion. He has been able to present his research at over 20 different conferences. Lambert’s presentation was recognized as an outstanding research presentation. In addition, Lambert won the President Award and was nominated as an outstanding senior of his department. His accomplishment has awarded numerous scholarships and paid summer internships around the nation. In his free time, Lambert enjoys playing soccer and the outdoors with friends.

Galeela Michael graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a degree in Global Studies. As an undergraduate, Galeela worked as both a Campaign Lead at the Multicultural Center and as a Student Outreach Coordinator at the Office of Development, where she raised thousands of dollars for student initiatives. She was the President of UC Santa Barbara’s Pan-African Student Union, which served to amplify the voice of African students on campus. Galeela also spent a summer in Washington D.C., where she interned at The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and conducted a research study analyzing the success of the Millennium Development Goals in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Nigeria. After graduating, Galeela returned to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she served as Programs & Operations Manager at a non-profit called /dev/color, which strives to maximize the impact of Black software engineers. Galeela was the third full-time hire at /dev/color, and made substantial contributions to the organization’s foundation, leading efforts to expand /dev/color to four cities nationally. Her experience at /dev/color jumpstarted her career at the intersection between tech and social impact, and today Galeela is most passionate about leveraging technology to improve peoples lives.

Alumni Update:

Since his fellowship year, Brent has relocated to Honolulu and is now a Certified Eye Bank Technician. He serves as Director of Operations at the Lions Eye Bank of Hawai’i, an eye tissue recovery and distribution nonprofit dedicated to meeting the transplantation needs of the Hawaiian Islands. His organization works to keep sight-saving eye tissue accessible to the communities that donate it, and he is proud to honor the wishes of eye donors and their families while strengthening the independent medical infrastructure of the Islands.

Fellow Bio:

While pursuing a double major at the intersection of Biomedical Engineering and African Studies at Yale, one of the things Brent enjoyed most was working with his campus chapter of Engineers Without Borders to design and implement infrastructural innovations that reduced water poverty in rural communities in Cameroon and Tanzania. Brent feels lucky to have seen up close the powerful effects that a community-level, locally directed development plan can have on improving health outcomes on the African continent, and so he is grateful for the chance to continue enabling that kind of work with Princeton in Africa, as a Sustainability Fellow at Nyumbani Village in Kenya. In the future, he hopes to use his skills as an engineer, combined with the firsthand knowledge of real-world needs and challenges gained during his fellowship year, to develop more affordable biotechnologies that can help to close resource and personnel gaps in medically underserved parts of the world.

Naomi grew up on Long Island, NY and graduated from Williams College, where she studied Economics and Public Health. She wrote her undergraduate honors thesis on the effects of cash transfer and empowerment programs on maternal and child well-being in Uganda, for which she was awarded Highest Honors and received the Jack Larned 1942 International Management Prize for a student paper of superior quality dealing with developmental enterprises. She also received the Van Duyne Prize in Economics to support her thesis work throughout her senior year. She spent eight weeks as an intern at IPA in Malawi, where she experienced the difficulties that arise when working in a developing country while also assisting with a project that focused on improving the incomes of small-holder farmers. She spent her junior fall in South Africa studying community health and social policy. After Williams, Naomi interned at HealthRight International, exploring how an international health organization manages both grant opportunities and projects in-country. Prior to her fellowship with Princeton in Africa at the Clinton Health Access Initiative, Naomi was a Research Associate at the Schroeder Center for Health Policy, based at William & Mary, where much of her work focused on domestic healthcare policy.

Megan has a lifelong passion for wildlife conservation and community service, stemming from her childhood which took her across eight states as well as Italy and Korea. Driven to find collaborative and innovative solutions to biodiversity and development challenges, she links science and advocacy to meaningful action. A graduate of the University of Virginia studying Environmental Science, Conservation Biology, and Global Sustainable Development, Megan has worked with the World Wildlife Fund and National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, supporting both terrestrial and marine programs. In collaboration with the Wildlife Conservation Society, she has helped develop the Marine Ecological Research and Monitoring Aid (“MERMAID”) app to accelerate coral reef data collection and analysis and has led workshops in Tanzania and Fiji to train local scientists to use the tool. She is also a certified Virginia Master Naturalist and is active in citizen science projects, community education, and leading volunteers in environmental projects and advocacy. Megan visited Kenya for the first time in 2017 and she is grateful to return to the country to work for Mpala Research Centre in the beautiful Laikipia County!

Sarah Mathys is a graduate of Georgetown University, where she majored in Anthropology and minored in Government and African Studies. Sarah has worked and studied across East Africa, and is interested in the intersections of spirituality, healing systems, and development work. She spent the spring of 2018 conducting independent qualitative research on the influence of religion on family planning decisions in eastern Uganda, and collected data which informed her honors thesis on the engagement between American FBOs and Ugandan communities. She has honed her project management and monitoring and evaluation skills through internships with The Carter Center, The Baker Trust for Transformational Learning, and now, a Monitoring & Evaluation fellowship with the Nyaka AIDS Orphans Project. In her spare time, she enjoys live music, contemporary art, and trying out new recipes.

Lucy, a native of Hunan, China, graduated summa cum laude from Bowdoin College with High Honors in Political Philosophy, a second major in Mathematics, and a minor in Computer Science. Lucy became passionate about international development, and particularly about funding issues and private-public partnerships, through her volunteer experience teaching English in Longshan Village in China, as well as her professional experiences in making resource allocation decisions in both public and private sectors. As an undergraduate, she interned as an analyst for Bowdoin College’s $1 billion endowment, and was the student representative on Bowdoin Trustee’s Financial Planning Committee. She was a part of Bowdoin’s Common Good Grant Program, in which competitively selected committee members raised funds and wrote grants to Maine non-profits after evaluation and site visits. Following graduation, Lucy worked at Bank of America Merrill Lynch as a research analyst, where she learned about useful market tools in improving the economy and consumer welfare. She conducted and published research on central bank policies, the US housing market, homeowner behaviors, bank regulations, securitization, and made investments recommendations to institutional investors. In her free time, she helps to educate prisoners through writing, enjoys rock climbing, skiing, watching soccer, and is an avid pianist. As a fellow, Lucy believes in African Leadership Academy’s mission in educating young leaders for the future of African development, and looks forward to applying her prior experiences with funding and markets to help ALA become more financially sustainable.

Born in Tucson, Arizona and raised in Seoul, South Korea, Amy graduated from New York University with a degree in Global Public Health and Anthropology. Amy grew up frequently moving between the two countries and attending numerous public and private schools. Experiencing a clash of cultures and different education systems, Amy became interested in the intersection of culture, education, and health. During her time in New York, she interned at HealthRight International, a global health and human rights NGO, where she took part in developing a ‘Reproductive Health and Human Rights’ online course. She also volunteered to teach teenagers to make healthy choices in public high schools in low-income communities. She studied abroad in Ghana and wrote a case study report about Ghana’s mental health system during her internship at KEBA Africa, highlighting the impact of policy and culture on health and education of abandoned children living in Accra Psychiatric Hospital. She also volunteered at a community-based organization where she developed and implemented a reproductive and sexual health curriculum at schools in urban slum areas. She hopes to continue serving underserved and marginalized populations, and one day see Africa lead the highest standard of healthcare and education.