The Joy Boissevain Scholar Award for Global Public Health was created to honor Joy Boissevain, a leader, scholar, and administrator with the Center for Global Health. Joy's scholarly work focused on the efficacy and transparency of institutional collaborations in a global context.
2018: The JBSA supported two projects in 2018. “Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of a Resource Limited Women’s Reproductive Health Curriculum” conducted by CLAS student, Mariam Gbadamosi, and 1st Year Medical Student, Hannah Sweeney, in partnership with Communities in South Lake Atítlan Basin in Guatemala is a longitudinal study. The research team expected to obtain confirmatory results of previous research showing the effectiveness of the Women’s Reproductive Health course in the South Lake Atítlan Basin region of Guatemala. The project aims to identify areas for improvements in course content and content delivery methods. Lastly, the team expects to identify attitudes in the South Lake Atítlan Basin community towards the inclusion of men and adolescent girls in future women’s reproductive health courses.
Additionally, in 2018, CLAS student, Maya Lezzem, worked on “Decreasing the Maternal and Infant Mortality Rate in the Democratic Republic of the Congo”. She worked with PROSAMI, a non-profit organization registered in the commonwealth of Virginia in May 2009, which focuses on the promotion of maternal and infant health in the rural areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). One of PROSAMI’s methods for promoting maternal and infant health has been to set up telemedicine systems in these two regions that link to the UVA health system so that a training course for nurse midwives can be implemented. Maya’s work would facilitate this training through the use of the UVA’s telemedicine system, but it would also allow for research regarding the effectiveness of said training through the collection of success stories and data. An aspect of the research is how these training methods are being implemented within the context of the existing cultures in the villages.
In 2017, the Joy Boissevain Scholar Award for Global Public Health was awarded to Bickey Chang (SOM) and Riley Hazard (CLAS) who worked at the Uganda Cancer Institute in Kampala, Uganda on better understanding chemotherapy-associated infections.
CLAS students, Alice Burgess and Emily Romano, working on a project to explore honey as an antimicrobial wound treatment in rural Rwanda, were awarded the 2016 Joy Boissevain Scholar Award. Their research is based on a long standing community partnership to which multiple prior CGH scholar projects have contributed.
In 2015, Anna Eisenstein, doctoral candidate in Anthropology, conducted her research project on, "Care and Power: Health Interactions in Mbarara." Based on evaluations of medical interactions which involve a variety of practitioners from various backgrounds (American, Cubans, urban Ugandans) treating patients from rural, Southwestern Uganda, Anna studied the question of what care looks like and what interactions in a specific culture convey care. She employed an ethnographic approach to answer these questions and to contribute to research on physician compassion and practice.
The 2014 Joy Boissevain Scholar is Lena Turkheimer, a graduate of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, BioMedical Engineering, who will complete her MPH at UVa in Spring 2015. Lena's project focuses on the prevalence and associated mortality of functional adrenal insufficiency in severely septic patients with and without suspected tuberculosis in Mbarara, Uganda and she is working with faculty at the Mbarara University of Science and Technology.
In 2013, Katherine Stanley, Masters of Public Policy candidate in the Batten School for Leadership and Public Policy and MPH candidate in Public Health Sciences was the Boissevain Awardee. Her project focused on Water and Health in Limpopo Community Partnerships in Tshapasha and Tshibvumo, South Africa.
The first designee for the award was made to Alice Bradshaw, Clinical Nurse Leader candidate in the School of Nursing. Her work was conducted in the Limpopo Province in South Africa.