As part of the Mann Initiative, global health scholars are invited to support initiative activities and engage with global health and human rights work at Drexel University.

2022 Visiting Scholar

Kyle Knight, MPH

Research interests: COVID-19, right to health for marginalized communities, gender and sexuality
Visiting scholar term: September 2021 – August 2022

Kyle Knight is a senior researcher on health and LGBT rights at Human Rights Watch (HRW). He has conducted research for HRW in the US, Europe, Central Asia, South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa.

He was a fellow at the Williams Institute of the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law in 2013-2014, where he led a study on HIV and human rights, and a Fulbright scholar in Nepal in 2011-2012 where he studied the LGBT rights movement.

As a journalist he worked for Agence France-Presse (AFP) in Nepal and for the UN’s humanitarian news service (IRIN), reporting from Burma, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia. He has worked for UNAIDS and the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice. He sits on the editorial board of the Annals of LGBTQ Public and Population Health Journal.

During his time at Drexel, he will be working with the Office of Global Health on COVID-19 in prisons, and developing an advocacy strategy for inclusive data for pandemic preparedness.

2021 Visiting Scholars

Karyn Kaplan

Research interests: HIV/AIDS, right to health for marginalized communities, COVID-19
Visiting scholar term: January 2021 – December 2021

Karyn Kaplan is the Executive Director of Asia Catalyst, a US- and Thailand-based nongovernmental organization that trains marginalized groups in Asia to advocate for their health and rights. She has lived in Thailand for more than 20 years. With leading HIV activist, Paisan Suwannawong, Karyn co-founded the Thai AIDS Treatment Action Group (TTAG), an HIV community-led organization to increase access to lifesaving HIV and hepatitis C treatment for people who use drugs, people in prison, migrant sex workers, and others. TTAG started the Thai Drug Users’ Network, which received a groundbreaking grant from the Global Fund for community-led scale-up of national harm reduction programming, which helped fuel a regional Asia drug user rights movement.

In the US, Karyn worked with Gay Men’s Health Crisis in the early 1990s, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (now Outright Action International), and Treatment Action Group, where she helped galvanize a global hepatitis C treatment access movement in low- and middle-income countries when the cure came out.

While a Visiting Global Health Scholar at Drexel, Karyn will work with Dornsife's Office of Global Health on developing an online advocacy course on health and human rights. She is also currently leading work on access and advocacy on COVID-19 vaccines in the Asia-Pacific region.

Shen Tingting, MA

Research interests: HIV/AIDS, right to health for marginalized communities
Visiting scholar term: January 2021 – December 2021

Shen Tingting is a prominent HIV and human rights advocate based in Beijing, China. From 2007-2012, Tingting was the Deputy Director of Dongjen Center for Human Rights Education and Action, in which she co-founded the Korekata AIDS Law Center, the first legal aid project to provide legal support for people living with HIV/AIDS and marginalized groups in China, and established the first outreach program for female sex workers in Beijing, providing health services as well as rights and legal training.

From October 2012 to February 2020, Tingting was the Director of Advocacy, Research and Policy at Asia Catalyst, in which she leads Asia Catalyst’s advocacy work on the right to health for marginalized communities through research, policy analysis, strategic lobbying and representation. During her time there, Asia Catalyst’s work on criminalization of sex workers in China successfully pushed for the dismantling of a nationwide system of arbitrary detention of sex workers in reeducation camps.

In March 2020, Tingting joined RNW-Media as an independent consultant on resource mobilization. Currently Tingting serves as a member of the UNAIDS Reference Group on HIV and Human Rights. She holds an MA in social security from Renmin University of China.

During her term at Drexel, Tingting will work on research related to digital surveillance and harm reduction and on access to antiretroviral treatment for women living with HIV.

2020 Visiting Scholar

Marian Wentworth

Visiting scholar term: January 2020 – December 2020
Research interests: Health systems development, vaccine policy, adolescent health

Marian W. Wentworth is President and Chief Executive Officer of MSH, a global nonprofit that works alongside leaders in low- and middle-income countries to build strong, equitable and sustainable health systems. Previously, Marian spent over 25 years managing and leading complex international public health initiatives at Merck & Co. At Merck, she led global strategy for marketing, manufacturing and research for the company’s $6 billion dollar vaccines business. A champion for adolescent health, she led the global sales and marketing launch of the world’s first cervical cancer vaccine, Gardasil. She also managed a portfolio of adult vaccines for shingles, influenza, pneumococcal disease, hepatitis B, hepatitis A, and tetanus. Marian currently serves on the Value of Vaccination Research Network (VoVRN) Steering Committee, WHO’s Product Development for Vaccines Advisory Committee (PDVAC), the Measles Rubella Microarray Patch Committee (MR-MAP), and the WHO Malaria Vaccine Committee (MALVAC).

During her term at Drexel, Wentworth will engage with students on current challenges in global health implementation and work on new initiatives for student and faculty research in collaboration with MSH.

2019 Visiting Scholars

Kamiar Alaei, MD, MPH, MS, DrPH, MSt

Visiting scholar term: January 2019 – December 2019
Research interests: Global health, health disparities, immigrant health, infectious disease

Kamiar Alaei was the Founding Director of the University at Albany’s Global Institute for Health and Human Rights (GIHHR) and the Advance Certificate in International Health and Human Rights.

During his time at Drexel, Alaei worked with students to identify global health and human rights field opportunities and research correlations between women's economic and social rights with health improvement and sustainable development.

Alaei also co-taught a course in health and human rights and built ties across the University with DUCOM, CNHS and others working in global health.

Victoria M. Gammino, PhD, MPH

Visiting scholar term: July 2019 – June 2020
Research interests: Global health, geospatial imaging, microplanning, infectious disease control, machine learning

Victoria Gammino is Chief Scientist at Disaster Intelligence, a Washington DC-based company that uses cognitive technologies in concert with massive scale data aggregation and real-time situational awareness to improve the response to global emergencies. Dr. Gammino began her career as an epidemiologist as an Epidemic Intelligence Officer with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She joined the Radiant Earth Foundation as Chief Science Officer in 2018. There she established a range of partnerships from health to conservation to strengthen capacity to use geospatial and remote sensing data in the Global South and scale the use of machine learning applications to support the Sustainable Development Goals.

During her time at Drexel, Gammino is working on a systematic review of health services uptake among African nomadic pastoralists, examining the impact of citizenship and boundaries on access to health services and drawing lessons for “One Health” approaches that integrate human and veterinary health service delivery and community-directed initiatives.

Ashley Jackson, JD

Visiting scholar term: January 2019 – December 2019
Research interests: Global health law, ethics, health policy, global health delivery

Ashley Jackson is the founder of the non-governmental organization Aid Ethics. The organization seeks to help development, humanitarian, and health organizations to meet their objectives while limiting potential harms. She has worked internationally in both private and public sector risk management. Jackson has studied, written, and spoken about anti-corruption, modern slavery, and other ethical challenges faced by organizations. She has a JD from the Seton Hall University School of Law and a BA in International Relations, Chinese, and Asia Studies from the University of Colorado.

During her time at Drexel, she has been working with students and with Drexel faculty to launch her organization and map development organization policies related to modern slavery and waste management.

Diederik Lohman, MS, MA

Visiting scholar term: January 2019 – June 2019
Research interests: Human rights and palliative care, drug dependence treatment, HIV, police abuse

Diederik Lohman spent over 20 years as a Researcher, Senior Researcher, Associate Director and Director of the Health and Human Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. He is an expert on health rights, palliative care, and global drug policy. Previously, his researcher focused on human rights more generally in the Europe and Central Asia region and he served as the Moscow office director. Lohman has a background in Russian studies and international law and speaks Russian, Spanish, French, Dutch, and German.

During his time at Drexel, Lohman collaborated on research related to counterfeit and fake (or falsified) medicines (including conflation of two in issues of global drug control) and conducted a literature review of criminalization of drug use on health seeking behavior of people who use drugs. Lohman also co-taught a course on health and human rights.