Faculty Activities

Arnold School of Public Health faculty members, along with undergraduate and graduate students, are working to improve the health of children and adults throughout the world through research, education, practice and outreach initiatives. Their work changes lives every day.

What we do

Our research activities and collaborations take place around the world. Search activities by faculty name, department, region or interest area.

If you are a faculty member with interests in global health and would like to be included on our list, please email emkenney@email.sc.edu.

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Faculty	Department	Region	Interest Area
Abbas Tavakoli	Nursing	Middle East, Asia, & Europe	Dr. Tavakoli is a biostatiscian with considerable experience in data management, linear modeling, logistic regression, and experimental design.
Alexander McLain	Epidemiology and Biostatistics	Africa	Dr. McLain has led the development of statistical methodology to estimate the annual burden of child malnutrition and obesity in African countries in collaboration with the World Bank, the World Health Organization, and the United Nations Children’s Fund. He is working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on a review of the methodology used to estimate the contribution of poor nutrition to the global burden of disease, disability, and mortality.
Andrea Jilling	Environmental Health Sciences	Global	Dr. Andrea Jilling is a soil biogeochemist with research interests in soil organic matter dynamics. She examines how agricultural practices influence the climate resilience, health, and sustainability of soil systems with a particular focus on carbon and nitrogen cycling.
Angela Liese	Epidemiology and Biostatistics	Europe	Dr. Angela Liese has been a researcher on a project involving the international comparison of snack food availability in supermarkets with colleagues at the Centre for Physical Activity and Nutrition Research at Deakin University in Australia. She is a mentor for international students in the Department of Epidemiology. She defines global health as “any health problem or health-behavior related problem that is manifested worldwide (or at least in more than one country) and is addressed with an international framework in mind.”
Anthony Alberg	Epidemiology and Biostatistics	Africa, Americas, Europe, Asia	In the past Dr. Alberg led a systematic review of diet and lung cancer for the World Cancer Research Fund that encompassed the global evidence. Presently he is working with the World Health Organization on a systematic review of the evidence on the health effects of e-cigarettes, a topic of global relevance.
Anwar Merchant	Epidemiology and Biostatistics	Western Pacific	Dr. Anwar Merchant collaborates with colleagues in Thailand in a study evaluating oral health and ventilator-associated pneumonia and on dental caries prevention in children with disabilities. He is also involved in a dietary intervention for cardiovascular health with colleagues in Saudi Arabia. He consults internationally on cardiovascular research with the World Health Organization in New Delhi, India. He defines global health as “the translation of scientific knowledge into practical solutions specific to a place, region, and country.”
Banky Olatosi	Health Services Policy and Management	Africa	Dr. Olatosi’s research focuses on HIV/AIDS and application of data science to solve health problems in African countries like Nigeria. He currently serves as a research consultant for a CDC funded international HIV grant in Nigeria. His HIV research focuses on linkage to, and retention in HIV care for vulnerable population groups in Africa. He is also serves as a technical assistant partner with the Center for Integrated Health Programs (CIHP). CIHP is a leading indigenous non-governmental organization established to promote better health outcomes for all Nigerians through creation of strong and sustainable health systems. CIHP supports family-focused, comprehensive high-quality, HIV/AIDS care and treatment activities in Nigeria, and currently treats over 200,000 people living with HIV.
Brian Chen	Health Services Policy and Management	South Asia	Dr. Brian Chen’s research interests include health care law, policy and management, international/global health, law and economics, and the economics of regulation in general. He is studying the impact of Japan’s implementation of the Diagnostic Procedure Code (akin to the Diagnosis- Related Group prospective payment system in the United States) on provider incentives and behavior. He advises students from Taiwan and China, in addition to students from within the state of South Carolina, the South and New England.
Charley Adams	Communication Sciences and Disorders	Western Pacific	As chair of the International Cluttering Association, Dr. Adams is on the Planning Committee for the World Congress on Fluency Disorders in Hiroshima, Japan in the summer of 2018. He also is collaborating with Dr. Nan Ratner at the University of Maryland, who is coordinating efforts to establish the Fluency Bank. This bank should help speech-language pathologists, logopedists, etc. worldwide better recognize and identify cluttering, which is often misdiagnosed as stuttering.
Christine Blake	Health Promotion, Education, and Behavior	Africa & Asia; Americas	Dr. Christine Blake is an international expert on food choice who has conducted both qualitative and quantitative studies on the drivers of food choice in diverse populations. Her work focuses on contextual and cognitive factors that drive food choice with an emphasis on people and organizations that shape these behaviors in families and children. Dr. Blake teaches undergraduate and graduate level course in public health nutrition, health promotion, and qualitative methods for public health research and practice.
Curtis Elliott	School of Medicine	China	Dr. Elliott worked as a primary care physician and educator in Shanxi Province, China from 1997 - 2017. Special interests include tuberculosis, hepatitis B, and working effectively within a local healthcare system different from that of one's home country. He is currently a clinical assistant professor working with resident physicians specializing in Family Medicine.
David Fuente	School of the Earth, Ocean and Environment	East Africa, Middle East, & South Asia	Dr. Fuente's research is situated at the intersection of infrastructure planning, environmental policy, and international development and focuses specifically on the provision of water and sanitation services in low- and middle-income countries. Trained as an environmental economist, urban planner, and environmental scientist, Dr. Fuente has conducted extensive fieldwork in East Africa (Kenya), the Middle East (Egypt), and South Asia (India). His research has been supported by the World Bank, USAID, the SIDA-funded Environment for Development Initiative, and the Global Development Network.
David Simmons	Health Promotion, Education, and Behavior	Americas	Dr. David Simmons’s current research focuses on the relationship between human rights abuses and health outcomes for Haitian agricultural workers, or braceros, in the Dominican Republic. His research also focuses on international health, social justice, health and healing in the African Diaspora, social and health disparities, community-based participatory research, community-university partnerships.
Deborah Billings	Health Promotion, Education, and Behavior	Latin America	Deborah L. Billings serves as Senior Advisor for Group Care Global (GCG), which promotes group health care for mothers, infants, partners, and their families to improve maternal and child health and well-being. With support from the EU’s Horizon 2020, GCG collaborates with nine partners in seven countries to implement group prenatal and postpartum/parenting care. For the past 35 years, she has worked globally on sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice, including access to safe abortion, contraceptive care, prevention of intimate partner and sexual violence, prenatal-birthing-postpartum group care. During her undergraduate degree, she conducted research in Costa Rica on family planning usage and moved to Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico upon graduating to work on contraceptive access in border regions, especially in the maquiladoras. During her doctoral program, she lived and worked in Guatemala and along the Guatemala-Mexico border to conduct oral histories with Guatemalan refugee women about their experiences of organizing in exile. In 1995, she began a career as a researcher with Ipas, where she worked globally on access to postabortion care (PAC) and safe abortion care. Dr. Billings has served as a consultant to organizations including World Bank, UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women (UNTF), and The Fund for Global Human Rights.
Devin Bowes	Environmental Health Sciences	Europe	Dr. Devin Bowes focuses her research on using wastewater as a tool to assess community health in a manner that is inclusive, minimally invasive, and cost-effective in order to reduce health disparities; a field often referred to as wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE). Dr. Bowes has experience applying this methodology in a diverse range of urban and rural settings across the globe, with a particular focus on exploring how WBE could be utilized in the context of forced displacement and migration to improve health and influence policy change. She is currently part of a multidisciplinary team spearheading an integrative WBE project along the Western Balkan Route, with plans to continue to expand this work in other migratory regions.
Dirk den Ouden	Communication Sciences and Disorders	Europe	Dirk den Ouden directs the Neurolinguistics Laboratory, which investigates how linguistic structure affects language impairment after stroke. His collaborators include researchers from Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Russia, where he has taught in a neurolinguistics summer school program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE), Moscow.
Edena Guimaraes	Health Promotion, Education, and Behavior	Latin America	Dr. Guimaraes has conducted multiple HIV and sexually transmitted disease prevention research studies that focused on newly emigrated Hispanic/Latinx individuals in South Carolina. Her most recent study is seeking to better understand COVID-19 vaccine acceptance or hesitancy among Spanish and Portuguese speakers in the state. Dr. Guimaraes teaches public health courses in Costa Rica during Maymester through the Education Abroad Office’s Global Health in Costa Rica Program.
Edward Frongillo	Health Promotion, Education, and Behavior	South Asia	Dr. Edward Frongillo conducts research globally to learn how to improve the growth, development, feeding, care, and survival of infants and young children. He leads research on the measurement, determinants, and consequences of household and child food insecurity, most recently conducting research with colleagues and students giving voice to the experiences of food insecurity by children. His research program also aims to understand how to advance policy and programs for improving nutrition and development. He teaches courses in global health and program evaluation, and mentors graduate students from around the world.
Eric Brenner	Epidemiology and Biostatistics	Europe	Dr. Eric Brenner is a medical epidemiologist with the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control. His research interests include communicable disease control programs and tuberculosis and vaccine preventable diseases. For more than 20 years, he has taught an MPH program at the medical school in Geneva, Switzerland. He also has consulted with and taught for other international organizations, including the World Health Organization, UNICEF, USAID and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
G. Thomas Chandler	Environmental Health Sciences	Europe	Dr. Tom Chandler’s research interests include aquatic ecotoxicology with emphasis on endocrine-disrupting pesticides, UV-mediated toxicant behavior, contaminated sediment toxicology, reproductive toxicology and teratogenesis, and meiobenthic ecology; risk assessment of xenobiotics in estuarine ecosystems; trophic transfer of pesticides, metals, and organometals; and microcosm modelling under pollution stress. Since 2002, he has represented the U.S. in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development Expert Advisory Committee on Invertebrate Toxicity Testing, Paris.
Geoff Scott	Environmental Health Sciences	Europe	Dr. Scott's research has focused on the impacts of climate change on ocean health issues such as Harmful Algal Blooms, Infectious Microbes and Contaminants of Emerging Concern as they affect both ecosystem and human health. Interacting with ocean and human health researchers throughout Europe including Exeter University in the United Kingdom the Hanse Institute for Advance Learning in Delmenhorst, Germany. Research focuses on impacts of increased temperature, flooding and alterations in salinity of the growth and toxin production of HABs and virulence of Vibrio bacteria
Hala Ghattas	Health Promotion, Education, and Behavior	Middle East & North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa	Hala Ghattas' research agenda centers on the links between inequity, food insecurity, malnutrition and poor health, and on the development and evaluation of interventions to address these. Her work has focused on rural, marginalized or refugee populations in Low- and Middle-income countries. Dr Ghattas has designed large population surveys, community-based interventions and evaluations, and used mixed methods and digital technology tools to advance both the implementation and translation of her research.
Heather Bonilha	Communication Sciences and Disorders	South Korea	Dr. Bonilha’s research focuses on improving the care of persons with voice and swallowing disorders. Her research ranges from understanding the mechanisms of these disorders across the translational continuum through to health policy. While much of her research involves prospective clinical studies, often there are important questions that can only be answered using big data. For some of this big data research, Dr. Bonilha collaborates with Dr. Hong at Yonsei University, Wonju, South Korea, and co-mentors several of his students.
James R. Hébert	Epidemiology and Biostatistics	Africa	Dr. James Hébert has been the director of the S.C. Statewide Cancer Prevention and Control Program (CPCP) since its founding in 2003. The CPCP is dedicated to discovering the underlying causes of the largest cancer disparities in the world, ranging from oral cancers in India to numerous cancers in African Americans compared to their European-American counterparts. Much of the recent work in diet and related health factors focuses on the Dietary Inflammatory Index, which Dr. Hébert invented in 2004 and is now being used by >100 research groups in 36 countries around the world.
Jamie Lead	Environmental Health Sciences	Europe	Dr. Lead's research aims at understanding nanoscale phenomena in the environment and he is interested in investigating natural nanomaterials, manufactured nanomaterials and their interactions. He is a member of the UK DEFRA scientific advisory committees the Advisory Committee on Hazardous Substances (ACHS) and the Nanotechnologies Environmental Hazard and Risk Assessment Taskforce. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) and is editor of the journal Environmental Chemistry published by the CSIRO.

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Arnold School of Public Health

Faculty Activities

What we do

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