Wilson Hammett | Mozambique
Wilson is a first-year master’s student in the Department of Global Health. As a native of Blacksburg, Virginia, Wilson first became passionate about mental health after the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007. This interest later deepened while teaching middle school in New Orleans, where she found a profound lack of access to mental health resources for her students with symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a realization that prompted her decision to shift her academic and career focus to global mental health. Wilson’s research interests include mental health intervention design and evaluation, with specific interest in addressing trauma in communities affected by violence or natural disaster. While at the University of Washington, Wilson has worked as a Research Assistant supporting Health Alliance International’s mental health interventions in Mozambique. With the Global Mental Health Fellowship, Wilson plans to evaluate the initial effectiveness, acceptability and feasibility of the implementation of a task-sharing mental health intervention piloted in the public HIV care setting in Mozambique in order to inform potential scale up and future evidence-based interventions for improved mental health care integration.
Sauharda Rai | Nepal
Sauharda is a first year PhD student at The Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington. Before coming to UW, Sauharda worked for seven years in Nepal, Ethiopia and South Africa studying the mental health effect of conflict and disaster, building mental health systems in post-conflict societies, addressing mental health stigma, and psychosocial re-integration of Nepali child soldiers. His area of interest lies in the intersection of conflict and global mental health focused in South Asia, particularly Nepal.
At UW, Sauharda is working on understanding how migration induced by conflict, political instability and disaster effects the mental health of their families left-behind in rural Nepal. He will be using theories and approaches from social sciences, psychiatry, psychology and medical anthropology to answer his research questions. Through the Global Mental Health Fellowship, he will be travelling back to Nepal and start piloting this work. He will be working together with his partner institutions in Nepal to conduct series of preliminary interviews and focus group discussions and also test his research methods.
Amal Saleh | Seattle/Kenya
Amal is currently completing her first year as a graduate student in the University of Washington Community-Oriented Public Health Practice program within the School of Public Health. She is a Somali immigrant and has lived in Seattle for 20 years. She currently works as Health Equity Community Research Liaison with the Center for Diversity and Health Equity at Seattle Children’s Hospital. Amal works with community partners to inform and guide the decision-making efforts for CDHE’s research efforts focused on health equity. As a future public health practitioner, she hopes to continue to work with vulnerable populations implementing prevention strategies and alleviating health inequalities through outreach and education. The Global Mental Health Fellowship will allow her to carry out a research project for her Master’s in Public Health degree. Amal’s research project aims to examine how mental health problems are being addressed among Somali refugee in Nairobi and Seattle and take the first steps toward testing novel methods for culturally sensitive collection of information about mental health care practices in refugee communities.