Task Forces

Internships Committee

Derek Bunch Derek Bunch – Derek served as a Healthy Villages team leader in 2012. His graduate work has focused on understanding the basic biology and clinical manifestations of infections caused by parasitic helminthes, protozoa and viruses including morphological features, host-parasite interactions, geographic distribution, methods of transmission and control, pathology, and diagnosis. He is currently a research lab technician at Tulane University where his research focuses on investigating the interactions between human and parasite proteins to understand the host-parasite relationship between Plasmodium falciparum and its human host. He plans to apply to medical school in the spring.
marybeth_sm Mary Beth Campbell – Mary Beth Campbell studied Biology at Seattle University and is currently working toward her MSPH in Tropical Medicine from Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, from which she will graduate in May 2012. She served as an intern with UVP in 2011 and is currently a member of the UVP Internship Task Force.
Juan Jaramillo – Juan served as a Healthy Villages team leader in 2010. His graduate work focused on the nexus of health and economic development as well as project management. He is finishing his master’s in International Political Economy at the University of Miami – Florida and attended Florida International University for undergraduate and graduate studies until 2003. He is currently the VMMC Program Manager for SCMS, a USAID HIV-AIDS supply chain project, in Arlington, VA.
Jennifer Jehnsen – Jenn served as a Healthy Villages Program team leader in summer 2009. She was also a volunteer for Global Medical Brigades and worked in mobile health clinics in rural Honduras. Jenn graduated from UC Berkeley in May 2010 with a degree in Environmental Science and Global Poverty and Practice. She currently is a high school biology teacher in McGehee, Arkansas through the Teach For America program.
Catherine Kirk – Cat served as a Healthy Villages team leader and Sujal Parikh Social Justice Research Fellow in summer 2011. In her fellowship with UVP, Cat studied the health needs and experiences of older adults living in Iganga and presented her findings at the International Conference on Aging, Mobility, and Quality of Life. She graduated from the University of Michigan with a master’s in public health in 2012 where she specialized in global health and HIV/AIDS. Cat is currently a Program Manager at the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights and is based in Rwanda.
Julie Petersen – Julie began working with UVP as a member of the Healthy Villages Follow-up Team in 2010. She graduated from Washington and Lee University with a degree in Political Science and the Shepherd Program for Interdisciplinary Study of Poverty and Human Capability. Prior to her involvement with UVP, her academic and professional work focused on grassroots public health initiatives in Latin America and the Caribbean. She is currently a fourth year medical student at the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine, pursuing a career in Primary Care and global medical education development.
Elizabeth Warren – Elizabeth recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied International Relations and Anthropology. During her undergraduate career, she managed the international projects for Penn’s chapter of Engineers Without Borders, working on water distribution projects and a latrine construction project in Cameroon and coordinating an irrigation project in rural Guatemala. She interned with UVP in 2010. Her international experiences sparked a passion for international development and global health that continues to thrive today. Currently, Elizabeth lives in Les Cayes, Haiti, where she works for an organization called Hope for Haiti as the Program Manager for their Clean Water and Public Health Education Programs.

Fundraising & Development Committee

emily_sm Emily Chuba – Emily has stayed in touch with UVP since volunteering with us in 2004 – she currently works as a rape crisis counselor and volunteers as a mentor for medically at risk refugee women. She has future plans to pursue her Master’s degree in Public Health.
David Dinh – David served as the UVP treasurer and assisted with the treasury after a stint as an intern with the team in 2006. He also served as a team leader of a safe water intern team in 2009, and oversaw the development of a program to create modified clay pots for safe water storage that distributed locally made pots throughout the district and beyond.
Archana Jayakumar – Archana served on the UVP board from 2009-2010 after a stint as an intern in 2008. She graciously assists Uganda Village Project with graphic design/arts related issues.
stephanie_sm Stephanie Lewczyk – Stephanie served as part of a team working with UVP’s scholarship students, and is a talented artist who runs her own shop on Etsy for handmade crafts, and has started a handmade craft shop to benefit Uganda Village Project as well.
Nishant Pandya - Nishant served on UVP’s first Nutrition Team in the summer of 2012 with hopes of establishing a sustainable nutrition program that can be integrated into the UVP Healthy Village Program. He also conducted research on child feeding practices in hopes of learning more about child nutrition in the Iganga District. Nishant is currently an undergraduate student at The Pennsylvania State University and will graduate in 2014.
Melanie Poole - Melanie co-ordinates Parliamentary Advocacy on reproductive and sexual health for the Australian arm of CARE International, and has degrees in Arts and Law. She first became passionate about east Africa, and particularly about reproductive healthcare, when she volunteered at the Kakuma Refugee camp on the Kenya/Sudan border. Melanie travelled and volunteered in Uganda, where she saw how initiatives like the Uganda Village Project achieve success through being participatory, locally contextualised and taking an evidence-based, health-focused approach to program delivery.
Fyfe Strachan- Fyfe served as the Uganda Village Project’s Fundraising Chair in 2011, and achieved record breaking fundraising levels during her tenure. She has previously volunteered in a number of roles, including organizing youth programs and events for Amnesty International Australia, working on a women’s rights project with UNIFEM in Vietnam and helping to organize Hanoi’s Aid for Asia tsunami relief fundraiser in 2005. Fyfe has legal degrees from Sydney University and Australian National University and is currently working in Ghana.fyfe ( at ) ugandavillageproject.org

Monitoring & Evaluation Committee

Leah Bevis- Leah graduated from Middlebury College with a major in Geography, and a minor in Economics. Raised in Hawaii, she has lived, worked and studied in Switzerland, England, Barcelona, Malawi and Uganda. She first volunteered in Uganda in 2006, conducting writing workshops with vulnerable youth. She returned to Uganda, on a Project for Peace grant from the Katherine Wasserman Davis Foundation, to work on an ethnographic radio story-telling project with youth. After a stint with the New Sudan Initiative in the USA, Leah returned to Uganda as UVP’s first Healthy Villages Program Coordinator. Leah is pursuing a PhD in Economic Development.
sonali_sm Sonali Palchaudhuri – Sonali is a medical student at University of Michigan. She interned with UVP in 2009 where she focused on safe water and sanitation programs. She has a degree in biomechanical engineering from Harvard.
ozge_sm Ozge Tuncalp – Ozge is currently writing her dissertation proposal for her doctoral degree in public health at Hopkins, on maternal health in Ghana. She has been working with UVP with a focus on obstetric fistula issues since 2004.
ce_sm Ce Zhang – Ce is a premedicine major in the Schreyer Honors College at Penn State University, and spent the summer of 2009 with UVP in Uganda. He has done research in collaboration with UVP on tippy taps for primary schools, and co-founded the initiative Tippy Taps for Africa.