Current Fellows

Adam Abdullahi, PhD, (Nigeria), is a second-year Takemi fellow. He is currently a Cambridge-Africa Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge and a junior research faculty at the Institute of Human Virology Nigeria. His current research interests include the dynamics of immune responses to vaccination and exposure to emerging infectious diseases across African populations, including characterizing pre-existing population-level immunological determinants of the less severe outcomes observed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr. Abdullahi’s overall work focuses on generating critically needed empirical evidence to guide infectious disease policy action and build local research and response capacity for both Nigeria and the West African region.

His Takemi research is titled: Navigating Future Infectious Disease Threats: Assessing Nigeria’s Preparedness and Response Strategies.

Fareeda Abo-Rass MSW, PhD, (Palestinian), is a second-year Takemi fellow. She is a social worker and researcher. Currently, she is a postdoctoral fellow at the school for social work at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Dr. Abo-Rass’s research focuses on the psychosocial aspects of mental health among the Palestinian minority in Israel, specifically knowledge and mental health literacy, subjective beliefs, and attitudes, and their relationship to health outcomes and behaviors.

Her project is titled Reconceptualizing Mental Health Literacy in War and Disaster Zones.

Francis Anderson Adzei, PhD (Ghana) is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Health Services Management at the University of Ghana Business School. He obtained PhD in Public Administration from the University of Ghana, Master of Philosophy (MPhil) in Health Promotion from the University of Bergen, Norway and a Bachelor of Science in Administration (BSc. Admin) in Health Services Administration from the University of Ghana. He also obtained Bachelor of Laws (LLB) degree from the University of Ghana and the Qualifying Certificate in Law (QCL) from the Ghana School of Law to practice law as a Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Ghana. He believes that health inequalities gap can be narrowed by using the law as an instrument for development.

In addition to his teaching, research, and extension activities at the University of Ghana, he provides extension services for several public and private sector organizations. As a Takemi Fellow in International Health, he is upbeat about how health promotion strategies can help address health inequalities within his country, based on lessons from the national response to the Covid-19 pandemic. He looks forward to seeing practical solutions to global health inequalities and inequities within health systems.

His Takemi project is titled: Optimizing Health Promotion Strategies for Improved Health System Resource Allocation: Lessons from Ghana’s COVID‐19 Pandemic Response.

Theodros (Tedi) Getachew, PhD (Ethiopia) holds a PhD in Public Health focusing on quality of care provided for sick child in the context of integrated community case management. He has a biostatistics and medical laboratory background with an experience of the Ethiopian health care system.

The focus of his research has been generating evidence across the health system and reproductive health area, this has included evaluation of program, interventions, and strategies. Currently, Dr. Gertachew is the director of the Health System Research at the Ethiopian Public Health Research Institute.

His Takemi project is titled: Quality, equity, and effective coverage of child health services in Ethiopia.

Daisuke Kato, MD, PhD (Japan) is a family physician and holds a PhD in medicine. He serves as a part-time lecturer in the Department of Family Medicine at Mie University Graduate School of Medicine and as a project researcher at the Center for Preventive Medical Sciences, Chiba University. His research focuses on social isolation and its impact on health, aiming to find effective interventions to mitigate these effects.

In his dual roles at Mie University and Chiba University, Dr. Kato is deeply involved in both teaching and research. He investigates the health impacts of social isolation and seeks practical solutions to address this pressing issue. His work is dedicated to demonstrating how appropriate support and interventions for socially isolated individuals can positively influence their overall health outcomes.

His Takemi project is titled: Eliminating Social Isolation of Older Persons and Reducing Regional Health Inequities: Towards Age-Friendly Cities with a Focus on Social Well-Being.

Anya P.G.F. Vieira Meyer, MD, (Brazil) is a Senior Researcher at the Fundação Oswaldo Cruz Ceará and Professor at the Centro Universitário Christus. She graduated in Dentistry from the Federal University of Ceará (UFC) in 1998, holds a PhD (2005) from the University of Toronto (UofT) and an MSC (2000) from the University of London (UL). She was a visiting scholar at the University of California Berkeley in 2015/2016, where she studied the relationship between primary health care quality and child mortality, as well as the influence of PMAQ (a pay-for-performance strategy – P4P – implemented in Brazil between 2010 and 2018) on PHC quality. She was a visiting scholar (Lemann Fellow) at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (2024) – Harvard University.

Dr. Meyer is currently coordinating a research group (NósAPSBrasil), composed of more than 20 researchers from 4 states and 8 municipalities in the Northeast region of Brazil, to study the reverberations of urban violence and Covid-19 on health workers, especially on the mental health and work process of community health workers.

Her Takemi Project is titled: A longitudinal study of the effects of violence and COVID-19 on the mental health and work performance of community health agents in northeastern Brazil: Implications for Public policy and programs.

Yoshitaka Nishikawa, MD, PhD (Japan) is an epidemiologist and Assistant Professor at the Kyoto University School of Public Health. Based in Japan, he has practiced medicine as a physician and conducted research on clinical oncology and gastroenterology. Leveraging his expertise, he has been bridging clinical oncology, gastroenterology and public health in his research.

For more than ten years, he has worked as a physician in the disaster-affected area of Fukushima, Japan and focused on disaster risk reduction research. In this program, he advances research on iodine blockade following nuclear emergencies to prevent thyroid cancer. His goal is to apply field knowledge to society through public health research approaches, including case studies.

His Takemi project is titled: Stable Iodine Implementation as a Thyroid Protection Measure in Radiation Emergencies.

Camila Volij, MD (Argentia) is a physician, graduated from the University of Buenos Aires School of Medicine (UBA) in 2015. She completed her residency training program at the Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires (HIBA), specializing in Family Medicine in 2019. Following this, she pursued a research fellowship in family medicine at HIBA in 2021, simultaneously completing a Master’s in Clinical Effectiveness at IECS/UBA. Currently, she works as a family doctor and researcher at HIBA and as a junior researcher at CIIPS (IECS).

Dr. Volij has participated in numerous research projects focused on health policies, epidemiology, cancer, and gender, many of which have received national and international funding.

Her Takemi project is titled: Policy Analysis of cervical cancer access and effective coverage across the continuum of care in Argentina.

Jie (Jane) Zhao, MD, PhD (Hong Kong) is currently an Assistant Professor at School of Public Health, the University of Hong Kong. With trainings in medical science, nutrition and epidemiology, her broad research interest is to understand the aetiology of non-communicable chronic diseases, as well as identifying modifiable targets for prevention and treatment of chronic diseases.

Dr. Zhao has been interested in the effect of endocrine factors in chronic diseases, such as the role of sex hormone binding globulin and testosterone in chronic kidney disease (published in JASN 2021 and BMC Medicine 2020, the latter selected as a featured article of that issue). She is working on the role of dietary factors and medications, such as antihypertensive drugs, as potential targets for prevention and treatment of chronic diseases. She is also coordinating a large elderly cohort in Hong Kong, which includes ~180,000 elderly people across 18 districts in Hong Kong.

Her Takemi Project is titled: Building prediction models for depression based on multi-cohorts with diverse socio-economic conditions in Asia.