Astier M. Almedom, Director

Astier Almedom was educated at the University of Oxford in the interdisciplinary honours school of  Human Sciences (BA, 1986; MA 1989). Her doctoral research training was in Biological Anthropology ( D.Phil., 1991). Dr. Almedom has maintained close contact with  Wadham College Oxford, her Alma Mater Studiorum, an exceptional place with an extraordinary living history.  Dr. Almedom spent her post-doctoral years teaching and mentoring graduate students in the  Master of Public Health in Developing Countries (PHDC) and doctoral programs of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.  Her interests in environmental health, and maternal morale in settings of often protracted "complex emergency" led her to spend more time in capacity building initiatives through continual on-site training of non-academic public health and community development field-level practitioners in eastern Africa, and parts of south-west Asia.

Dr. Almedom also served in the British government National Health Service (NHS) senior management  in the Lambeth, Southwark, and Lewisham (LSL) Health Action Zone (HAZ) where she chaired the multi-agency Evaluation and Learning Workstream, commissioned the HAZ evaluation and co-authored the HAZEL (Health Action Zone Evaluation and Learning) Manual with Leroy White, Yvonne Field, Julia Mason, and Abigail Bennett (2000). Living and working in South London brought home to Dr. Almedom the resilience as well as profound vulnerabilities of asylum seekers and refugee children and young people in the UK. She began to understand the role of multi-agency partnerships in driving change and transformation of health and social systems in deprived inner-city neighborhoods where the HAZ, Children First, sought to build community social capital and tackle health inequalities focusing on children and young people in the context of their social, emotional, and spatial ecosystems.  Dr. Almedom's passion for field work to investigate and analyze water, sanitation, and hygiene (basic public health) facilities for rural women and children in the South continues to drive her mentorship of Tufts graduate and undergraduate students participating in the prominent cross-school interdisciplinary graduate program, Water: Systems, Science and Society, Engineers Without Borders, BUILD Guatemala, RESPE, and BUILD India, among other student-led community health and development initiatives.

Dr. Almedom is committed to combining her research and curricular  activities,  engaging both graduate and undergraduate students in interdisciplinary thinking and experiential learning across Tufts' schools including The Fletcher School.  Recent years have seen Dr. Almedom take resilience seminars and workshops to high level science and social policy venues internationally, most notably the Eurpean Forum Alpbach, while remaining involved in advising and mentoring students and faculty are open to alternative points of view and engage positively in promoting imaginative and critical thought across disciplines.

Dr. Almedom will be on research leave during 2011-2012.

 
John Parker, Research Associate

John is an MALD candidate at The Fletcher School, joint degree with the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy and Tufts University's interdisciplinary graduate cross school Water: Systems, Science and Society Program.  John previously managed and implemented USAID-funded watershed management programs in Guatemala, and served as a natural resources extensionist Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador's Amazon Basin region. John's first degree was in Latin American Studies and Anthropology from Middlebury College. In 2010, John conducted fieldwork in Honduras investigating the spread of agricultural innovations among farmers and their impact on social-ecological resilience, using network analysis. The results were presented at Resilience 2011. John is co-Editor-in-Chief of our in-house Resilience Journal, a student-run electronic publication hosted by the Fletcher School.

Laura Kuhl, PhD Candidate

Laura Kuhl is completing her MALD degree at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy where she has been studying International Environmental Policy, Development Economics and Human Security. Laura also  completed the Water: Systems, Science and Society program at Tufts.  Laura's research focuses on climate change adaptation and flooding in Honduras, as well as flood adaptation and environmental justice communities in Boston.  Laura has presented her work at Resilience 2011 among other international meetings. Laura is embarking on her doctoral research work while also serving as co-Editor-in-Chief of Resilience, with John Parker and other interested graduate students at the Fletcher School, the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, and the Medical School at Tufts University. Laura's previous research has appeared in scholarly peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Economic Anthropology .

Jacqueline Kingfield, Directed Study

Jacqueline Kingfield is a second year MALD candidate at the Fletcher School with a focus on NGO management and Human Security. After graduating from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in 2006, Ms. Kingfield moved to Hanoi, Vietnam where she led efforts to establish a new business for DKT International, a USA-based family planning organization. She then worked on the management team at SaafWater, a start-up social enterprise promoting clean water in urban slums in Karachi, Pakistan.  In the Fall 2010 semester, Jacqueline worked with the Timmy Foundation following up Fletcher alumni Rebecca Permuletter’s thesis research on strengthening the organization’s design, monitoring and evaluation systems.  Jacqueline is recipient of a Boren Fellowship for a year (2011-2012) in New Delhi, India where she will be learning Urdu to complete her MALD. Jacqueline Kingfield co-led the Fletcher School's Global Health Club (2009-2011).

Recent graduates

Chloé Rousseau, BA. Donald A. Cowdery Memorial Scholarship recipient.

Charlotte Bourdillon, BA. AP Fellow, Kakenya Center for Excellence, Kenya.

Ayron M. Strauch, Ph.D., Post-doctoral Fellow, University of Hawaii, Manoa.

Evelyn A. Brensinger, MALD.

Rebecca Perlmutter, MALD.

Jocelyn G. Müller, Ph.D.

Matthew Gordon, BA.

Catlin McShane, MALD, Marketing & Engagement Manager, Opportunity Fund.

Jessica L. Anderson, BA, Co-founder/Director, Collaborative Transitions Africa.

Matthew S. Benson, BA.

Amanda Fencl, BA, Staff Scientist, SEI-US.

Shanti Sattler,BA, ICFC Fellow.