GRID3 - Key Persons
Sonia Ehrlich Sachs, MD, MPH is a pediatrician, an endocrinologist and public health specialist. She received a BA from Harvard University, an MD from the University of Maryland Medical School, and an MPH from Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Sachs practiced medicine for 20 years, 14 of which were at Harvard University Health Services in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At the Earth Institute, Columbia University, since 2005 she has led the design and implementation of low-cost primary health systems in low-income rural Africa and India. Her focus is on systems delivery, primarily for improvement of maternal and child health, at local and national scales. Sachs coordinated the health sector of the Millennium Villages Project, overseeing all health-related interventions and research. The Millennium Villages Project, in ten countries in sub-Saharan Africa, was an integrated rural development initiative, designed as a proof of concept, helping poor rural communities accelerate reaching the Millennium Development Goals, using a science-based, community led approach of integrated interventions that increase food production, increase access to health care, education, water, infrastructure and business development. Dr. Sachs was involved in the EI health team advisory to Haiti, India and Nigeria. She is the Director of the One Million CHW Campaign advocating for professionalised Community Health Workers, a cadre that is paid, supervised and supported by use of information communication technology. Sachs and her team currently advise the government of Ghana on the national scale up of Community Health Workers, including the national scale up of mHealth and Telemedicine.
Vince Seaman currently works at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington, where he is a Senior Program Officer for the Global Development Polio team. In that role, he supports polio eradication efforts and the use of geospatial and other data technologies for Gates Foundation projects worldwide. Prior to joining the Foundation, Dr. Seaman spent 7 years at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and was detailed to Nigeria for three years as a secondee to the World Health Organization, supporting polio and other vaccine-preventable disease programs.
Vince completed his MS and PhD in Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of California, Davis in 2006, after spending 15 years practicing as a licensed pharmacist and 8 years as a public high school science teacher in California.