Mr. Paul Petraro

Harvard School of Public Health

Mr. Paul Petraro is a second year doctoral student at the Harvard School of Public Health in the Nutrition Department. His current research interests include nutritional epidemiology and infectious diseases with a specific interest in HIV and nutrition in children in Africa. Mr. Petraro’s public health career began in Zambia as a Peace Corps volunteer. Following his time in Zambia, Mr. Petraro received an MPH in Epidemiology at Emory University. He has since conducted research in Tanzania on pregnancy outcomes in HIV negative women, worked with an HIV care and treatment team, and assisted with a vitamin A assessment of the country. He has also worked with the Centers for Disease Control on needle stick surveillance in U.S. hospitals. Mr. Petraro is looking forward to becoming more involved in nutrition and chronic disease research.

Dr. Abu Abdullah

Boston University School of Public Health

Dr. Abu Abdullah is currently an Associate Professor of International Health at the Boston University School of Public Health. Dr. Abdullah's primary research interest is in the area of global tobacco control, focusing on smoking-cessation training and education, program implementation and evaluation, and assessing the effectiveness of interventions to address tobacco dependency and exposure to secondhand smoking. His research also focuses on the prevention and control of chronic disease in developing countries by addressing major risk factors and medication adherence; infectious disease epidemiology with a focus on HIV/AIDS, TB and major childhood illnesses in the developing world; and health services research in developing countries. He has been an advisor for the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention since 2000. He is also a counselor of the Asia Pacific Travel Health Society, an active member of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco (USA), and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Travel Medicine.

Dr. Frank Hu

Harvard School of Public Health

Dr. Frank Hu is Associate Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health and Associate Professor of Medicine at the Channing Laboratory of Brigham Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. His major research interests include the epidemiology and prevention of type 2 diabetes and metabolic diseases through diet and lifestyle; gene-environment interactions in relation to type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular complications; and methodological development (especially dietary pattern analyses) in nutritional epidemiology. He is the Principal Investigator of the diabetes component of the Nurses' Health Study, and leads two NIH-funded projects to study biochemical and genetic risk factors for cardiovascular complications among patients with diabetes in the Nurses' Health Study and Health Professionals' Follow-up Study. His current research investigates complex interactions among nutrition, biomarkers, and genetic factors in the development of diabetes and cardiovascular complications. Dr. Hu is also collaborating with researchers from China to study obesity, metabolic syndrome, and cardiovascular disease in Chinese populations.

Dr. Rachel Nugent

Center for Global Development

Dr. Rachel Nugent is a Senior Health Program Associate in Global Health Programs at the Center for Global Development (CGD) in Washington, D.C. Dr. Nugent heads the working group on drug resistance, provides economic and policy expertise to support other Global Health Policy Research Network working groups, manages CGD programs on Population and Economic Development, and conducts research on other global health topics. She has 25 years of experience as a development economist, managing and carrying out research and policy analysis in the fields of health, agriculture and the environment. Prior to joining CGD, Rachel worked at the Population Reference Bureau, the Fogarty International Center of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Rachel’s publications include a range of topics, from the cost-effectiveness of non-communicable disease interventions and health impacts of fiscal policies to impacts of microcredit on the environment in developing countries and economic impacts of transboundary diseases and pests.

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