Post-docs
Valerie Bauza, Ph.D
Valerie earned a PhD in Environmental Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and has experience working on water and sanitation projects in the USA, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia. Valerie is interested in research that expands understanding of critical sources and transmission pathways for fecal contamination in low-income settings, and her current projects primarily focus on practices and interventions related to child feces management.
Staff
Amy Lovorn, MPH, Research Coordinator
Amy is the Research Coordinator for the HAPIN trial, a multi-country LPG stove intervention trial. She received her MPH in health behavior and health education from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has many years of experience managing research studies, primarily in the areas of reproductive health and HIV.
Gloria D. Sclar, MPH, Senior Public Health Program Associate
Gloria received her MPH in Global Health from Emory University in 2015 and is currently pursuing a PhD in Psychology at the University of Zürich. She has worked in the WASH sector for the past several years, collaborating with research teams in Tajikistan, Ethiopia, and India. Her work focuses on exploring behavioral factors influencing WASH practices, application of behavioral theory to intervention design, and psychological topics such as collective efficacy and social support. Currently, Gloria manages a cluster randomized-controlled trial evaluating a behavior change intervention aimed at improving child feces management practices among caregivers in rural Odisha, India.
Allison Salinger, MPH, Public Health Program Associate
Allison received an MPH in Global Health and a Certificate in Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene from Emory University in 2018. She has worked in collaboration with a variety of international and local NGOs to conduct programmatic WASH research and evaluations, particularly in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Her work focuses on the social and behavioral aspects of WASH; she is particularly interested in community-based WASH interventions and the social antecedents of collective action. Currently, Allison is working with a group of transdisciplinary researchers from Atlanta, Australia, Fiji, and Indonesia on RISE (Revitalizing Informal Settlements and their Environments), a randomized controlled trial that takes a planetary health approach to community WASH in informal settlements in Fiji and Indonesia.
Affiliated Faculty
Sheela Sinharoy, Ph.D, MPH
Sheela received her PhD in Nutrition and Health Sciences from Emory University in 2017 and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the Clasen research group from 2017-2020. She is now a Research Assistant Professor in the Hubert Department of Global Health at Emory University. She studies relationships between environmental health interventions and biological and social outcomes including nutrition, anemia, child development, and women’s empowerment.
RSPH Faculty Collaborators
Matthew Freeman, Ph.D
Matt received his PhD in infectious and tropical diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2011. He is an associate professor in the Gangarosa Department of Environmental Health, with joint appointments in epidemiology and global health. He has collaborated with Dr. Clasen on the WHO Sanitation Guidelines, as well as impact evaluations of WASH in India, Kenya, Mozambique, and Laos. He is interested in quantifying the dominant pathways of enteropathogens and WASH-related neglected tropical diseases in low-income settings with a focus on developing, testing, and scaling interventions using implementation science methods
Ajay Pillarisetti, Ph.D
Ajay’s research focuses on the impacts of household energy use on human health, the environment, and the climate. He is broadly interested in exposure assessment and the application of lower-cost sensor-based technologies to the monitoring and evaluation of environmental pollutants and related behaviors. He has developed and evaluated tools for measuring exposure to common combustion-related air pollutants, estimating ventilation rates in resource-constrained environments, and, with colleagues, pioneered the use of low-cost temperature data loggers as time-of-use appliance monitors.
PhD Students
Tyiesha Johnson, MPH
Tyiesha is pursuing her PhD in Environmental Health Sciences. She is currently working on several projects, which include assessing methods used to evaluate household energy interventions for cooking on a global scale, conducting an analysis on disparities pertaining to household energy cooking sources that exist within sub-Saharan Africa, and helping to coordinate a surveillance program to track pneumonia in young children within the Eastern Province of Rwanda.
Sabrina Haque, MPH
Sabrina is a PhD student in Environmental Health Sciences at Emory University. She earned her MPH from Columbia University and BS from the College of William and Mary. She is interested in impact evaluation, policy, and implementation science in the context of poverty reduction in low- and middle-income countries. Her main work with Dr. Clasen is serving as a co-investigator of a cluster randomized control trial in Eastern Province, Rwanda, evaluating the effectiveness of Lifestraw Family 2.0 filters in improving microbial drinking water quality and exploring pay-for-performance implementation.
Hemali Oza, MS
Hemali Oza is a PhD student in Environmental Health Sciences. She earned her MS in Environmental Science and Engineering from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2019. Her research interests include climate resiliency and WaSH. Hemali’s current project with the Clasen research group is conducting a systematic review on the occupational health hazards among sanitation workers.
Wenlu Ye
Wenlu is pursuing a Ph.D. in Environmental Health Sciences. She is interested in assessing the exposure and health impacts of air pollution and climate change in low- and middle-income counties as well as the implementation science of relevant policies and interventions.
Ian Hennessee, MPH
Ian is a PhD student in Environmental Health Sciences. He earned his MPH from Rollins in 2015, and worked at CDC for three years prior to starting his PhD. His research interests include vector-borne disease ecology, spatial epidemiology, and climate and health. His primary project with the Clasen research group is an evaluation of the impacts of changes in household air pollution on vector behavior and risk of vector-borne disease in Rwanda. He is also studying the impacts of agricultural environmental modification and climate change on resurgent malaria transmission in Rwanda.
Sarah Hamid, MPH
Sarah is a doctoral candidate in Emory’s Department of Epidemiology. She received her MPH in Chronic Disease Epidemiology and Global Health from Yale University and her bachelor’s degree in Human Biology and History from Brown University. Before undertaking doctoral studies, she worked for the CDC’s Global Disease Detection Center in Egypt and for the World Health Organization in the Philippines. Her research focuses on the patterns and etiologies of acute respiratory infections in low- and middle-income countries, and the implications thereof for public health and environmental interventions.
GRAs
Madison Lee
Madison is a second-year Master of Public Health student in Environmental Health at the Rollins School of Public Health. Her research interests include environmental chemistry, microbiology, and WASH. Her main work with Dr. Clasen is conducting a systematic review on the occupational health hazards among sanitation workers.
Alan Guo
Alan is a first-year Master of Public Health student in Global Environmental Health at Rollins School of Public Health. His primary interests include WASH, specifically availability of drinking water and sanitation equipment, as well as air pollution .