NNPHL - Key Persons
A. K. M. Musha is a veteran humanitarian leader, with experience spanning public health, comprehensive development programming, and emergency response across a number of countries. Currently, he is country director for Concern Worldwide in his native Bangladesh, and previously held the same position in Malawi. A medical doctor by training, Mr. Musha started his career as a public health professional, and in an earlier placement with Concern Worldwide, played an instrumental role in the organization's Municipal Health Partnership (MHPP) Child Survival Programme, which was widely credited with catalyzing the life-saving community-based approach, which Concern adapted and scaled up in other countries.
Over the course of his 21-year career, he has served in many senior level management and technical advisory positions with Concern and other humanitarian and development organizations. With Concern, he has overseen a complete range of programs based in Concern's community-driven approach supported by national level advocacy. As the organization enters its 48th year in the country, he is at the forefront of facilitating and capacity building of local civil society organizations in health, resilience, protection, and livelihoods programs in the most vulnerable communities from Dhaka to remote riverine islands; at the same time, his experienced team directly implements large-scale emergency response programs, including current initiatives with Rohingya refugees in Cox's Bazar.
In recognition of his leadership, Mr. Musha has been appointed to represent NGOs on the United Nations Humanitarian Coordination Task Team (HCTT), an interagency group that links directly with the government's Department of Disaster Management to encourage joint interventions, and increase aid effectiveness and efficiency through a more coordinated response effort - from needs assessment through to implementation and evaluation.
Job Titles:
- Lecturer at the Columbia School of Social Work
Allyson Brown Kenney brings to the program more than two decades of experience as both practitioner and executive. Over the last 15 years, she held a variety of positions at Concern Worldwide U.S., including Director of NNPHL, management and technical support of Child Survival grant funding and maternal & child health programs in Bangladesh, Burundi, Haiti and Rwanda. She also served as Concern's acting U.S. Operations Director, leading technical and operational staff and overseeing the organization's portfolio of U.S. government grants. Previously, she worked with a range of international and domestic non-governmental organizations, always with the aim of alleviating poverty and promoting health and dignity.
A respected international humanitarian and development professional, Allyson's expertise also includes partnership development, program design and management, fundraising, strategic planning, and representation and advocacy. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Peace and Conflict Studies from the College of the Holy Cross, and a Master of Science in Social Work degree and a Master of Public Health degree from Columbia University.
Job Titles:
- Civilian Professor at NWC
- Professor, Naval War College
Dave has served as a civilian professor at NWC since 2008, where he teaches courses on military strategy and operations, crisis planning, and humanitarian assistance/disaster relief. He is founder and director of NWC's Civilian-Military Humanitarian Response Program, co-founder, Civil-Miliary Humanitarian Working Group, and co-founder and co-director of the NWC-Harvard School of Public Health Joint Civilian-Military Humanitarian Working Group. Dave is a fourth-generation naval officer and Captain in the Navy Reserve. He has commanded four reserve units and currently is commanding officer of the Chief of Naval Operations, N3/N5 unit. While on active duty from 1992 to 2003, he served as a Surface Warfare Officer and Naval Flight Officer.
Job Titles:
- Professor of International Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Dr. Gilbert M. Burnham a faculty member in the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins which he founded in 1998. He has extensive experience in emergency preparedness and response, particularly in humanitarian needs assessment, program planning, and evaluation that address the needs of vulnerable populations, and the development and implementation of training programs. He also has extensive experience in the development and evaluation of community-based health program planning and implementation, health information system development, management and analysis, and health system analysis. He has worked with numerous humanitarian and health development programs for multilateral and non-governmental organizations, regional health departments, ministries of health (national and district level), and communities in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Current activities include work with the health systems in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Job Titles:
- Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School
Hugh O'Doherty, Adjunct Lecturer, was raised in Northern Ireland. He has taught leadership and conflict resolution at the Jepson School of Leadership Studies, the University of Maryland, and the John F Kennedy School of Government. At the University of Maryland, he directed the Ireland-US Public Leadership Program for "emerging" leaders from all the political parties in Ireland. In Northern Ireland, he directed the Inter-Group Relations Project, an initiative bringing together political and community leaders in Ireland to establish protocols for political dialogue. Hugh has consulted extensively with a wide variety of clients including the Irish Civil Service, the American Leadership Forum, the Episcopalian Clergy Leadership Program, and the Mohawk Community Leadership Program in Canada. He has also consulted in Bosnia, Croatia, and Cyprus and has addressed the United Nations Global Forum on Re-Inventing Government. Hugh earned an M.Ed and Ed.D from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Job Titles:
- Director of the Humanitarian Studies Initiative
- Director of the International Emergency Medicine Fellowship at Brigham
Dr. Kayden is the Director of the International Emergency Medicine Fellowship at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and an Instructor in Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School. As director of the Humanitarian Studies Initiative at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, she trains graduate level students as well as working professionals in global health and humanitarian work. She serves on the editorial board for the American Medical Association's Journal of Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness. Dr. Kayden received her undergraduate degree in Philosophy from Harvard University and her medical degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. She completed residency training in Emergency Medicine at Yale, then a fellowship in International Emergency Medicine at Harvard. She has a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree from the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Kayden helped develop emergency medical care in Bhutan, Fiji, Nepal, Japan, Germany, Serbia, El Salvador, Ethiopia, and Israel and the Palestinian Territories. She provided disaster relief to survivors of the 2005 Kashmir earthquake in Pakistan, helped rebuild health systems for Burundian refugees in Tanzania, and led a team to improve rural public health in Uganda, and published research on the effects of conflict on health in Liberia. She has taught health and human rights issues in more than a dozen countries. In 2010, Dr. Kayden helped establish a field hospital for survivors of the earthquake in Haiti.
Job Titles:
- Fellow
- Project Director for the External Evaluation of the Disasters
Dr. Vandana Sharma is Project Director for the External Evaluation of the Disasters and Emergencies Preparedness Programme at HHI and a Research Associate at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is a public health researcher with expertise in maternal and child health, HIV, and gender issues. Her research includes randomized trials of community-based interventions to reduce maternal mortality in northern Nigeria and of interventions to reduce HIV transmission and intimate partner violence in Ethiopia. She is also conducting mixed methods research in humanitarian settings to understand gender-based violence in these contexts. She earned her MD from the University of Western Ontario and an MPH from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where she was a Sommer Scholar.
Job Titles:
- Director of Resilient Communities Program, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative
Dr. Bollettino is the Director of Resilient Communities Program at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. Prior to his current appointment, Dr. Bollettino served for five years as Executive Director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. Dr. Bollettino has twenty years of professional and academic experience in humanitarian action, civil-military engagement in emergencies, and humanitarian leadership. He has spent that past sixteen years of his career at Harvard University in research, teaching, and administration. His current research focuses on civil military engagement during humanitarian emergencies, disaster preparedness and resilience, the professionalization of the humanitarian aid field and humanitarian leadership.
Dr. Bollettino has managed several large training and policy development initiatives related to disaster resilience, humanitarian leadership, and civil military coordination. He has designed security reporting systems and program evaluations for field security measures in complex emergencies, authored several publications related to disaster resilience and humanitarian assistance, and has consulted with numerous international nongovernmental organization and UN agencies.
Dr. Bollettino has taught courses on research design, peace building, and international politics at the Harvard Extension School. Dr. Bollettino came to Harvard University on a post-doctoral fellowship with the Program on Non-violent Sanctions and Cultural Survival at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. He completed his Ph.D. at the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver. Dr. Bollettino previously served on the board of ELRHA (Enhancing Learning and Research for Humanitarian Assistance), and is currently the President of the Action Against Hunger (ACF) International Scientific Committee.
Job Titles:
- Legal Research Associate at Harvard Humanitarian Initiative
Julia Brooks is a Legal Research Associate at Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI), where she focuses on international humanitarian law and protection in armed conflict, as well as humanitarian policy and education. For the Advanced Training Program on Humanitarian Action (ATHA), she serves as a researcher and trainer focusing on international humanitarian law and humanitarian protection in armed conflict; managing editor and contributor to the ATHA paper and blog series; and co-host and producer of the Humanitarian Assistance Podcast series. She also teaches and develops curriculum for e-learning tools, online and in-person courses and workshops on international law and humanitarian protection, civil-military relations, and humanitarian response in armed conflict and complex emergencies.
Previously, Julia worked in Berlin, Germany on human rights and transitional justice at the Foundation "Remembrance, Responsibility & Future" (Stiftung EVZ), the German Parliament (Bundestag), and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as a Senior Fellow with Humanity in Action. She has also worked on post-conflict justice and governance at the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina (OHR) in Sarajevo, Bosnia, and on international war crimes prosecutions the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, The Netherlands. She holds a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy (MALD) from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where she received the Alfred P. Rubin Prize and Leo Gross Prize for excellence in international law, and a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Public Policy from Brown University, magna cum laude.