Jennifer Schlecht Memorial Scholarship Fund

The Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health is pleased to announce the recipients of the third round of Jennifer Schlecht Practicum Scholarship for Sexual and Reproductive Health Justice in Fragile Settings as we remember her birthday this month. This cash award was created to honor Jennifer’s life and legacy, with the goal of creating a group of highly trained, passionate public health leaders who are committed to sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). The Schlecht Scholarship provides funding to select PopFam MPH students pursuing SRH Applied Practice Experiences (APEx) in fragile and low-resource settings.

Current Students: The next round of applications will open in Spring 2025.

If you would like to donate to the scholarship fund, please click below.

2024 Recipients

Roanne Elnogoumi will work with the Eastern Mediterranean Public Health Network in Jordan. She will work to strengthen a regional network of experts in pertussis and maternal immunization policies in the Middle East and North Africa region. This project aims to understand the drivers and barriers to Tdap (Tetanus, Diphtheria, Pertussis) vaccine use in pregnancy and raise community awareness for pregnant women through qualitative and quantitative assessments. The overall objective is to increase safe pregnancies and reduce disease in infants.

Sarah Branoff will work with WORUDET, a community-based women’s rights organization in Northern Uganda. She will help to implement programs focused on addressing sexual and reproductive health and gender-based violence risks for South Sudanese refugee women in the Palabek refugee settlement. She looks forward to gaining an understanding of working on SRH programs in humanitarian settings and supporting the WORUDET team in showcasing the incredible impact they are having.

Andrea Dongmo-Zebaze will collaborate with the RAISE Initiative, IRC Chad, and the University of N'Djamena on a mixed methods study of adolescent sexual and reproductive health in Chad. She will support capacity-building training for community interviewers, monitor data collection, and analyze qualitative data to gain insights into adolescent SRH knowledge and behaviors. Andrea aims to leverage this experience to inform recommendations for improved SRH service delivery, building on her prior work in Central Africa and preparing for future community-centered SRH programming in humanitarian settings.

Past Recipients 

2023

Natalie Andrasko worked with the Women and Rural Development Network (WORUDET), a community-based women’s rights organization, in Northern Uganda. Natalie worked on the "SHE CARES" project to test the feasibility of introducing self-care sexual and reproductive health products, such as self-injectable contraceptives, to adolescent girls and young women living in Palabek refugee settlement and the host community. Natalie assisted with human-centered design qualitative research with adolescent girls, drug shop owners, and health workers to understand their feelings and acceptance of self-care sexual and reproductive health. She also conducted and analyzed baseline surveys to determine drug shops’ and health facilities’ readiness to introduce self-care products. Natalie's favorite parts of her APEx were learning more about the humanitarian ecosystem in Ugandan settlements, applying her Mailman coursework to the project, and exploring on the weekends with her wonderful coworkers. Read more about her experience.

Katherine Kennedy worked with the Rakai Health Sciences Program (RHSP) in Uganda, a collaboration among Makerere, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins Universities. Katherine performed quantitative data analysis for a project focused on the timing of puberty and its relation to school enrollment and social transitions among adolescents. She will continue to work with RHSP this academic year on a research grant related to orphanhood and HIV in the Rakai community.  Read more about her experience.

Esther Parker worked with the African Population Health and Research Center (APHRC), an African-led research and policy institute, in Nairobi, Kenya. She supported a research study to evaluate the effectiveness of individualized counseling provided by community health volunteers (CHVs) in enhancing contraceptive uptake and continuation among adolescent mothers. Her primary activities involved planning and executing the endline survey, which entailed developing the endline survey questionnaire, creating the training manual for the endline data collectors, facilitating a week-long training for the data collectors, and conducting comprehensive literature reviews. Additionally, she participated in site visits to assess the progress of the intervention activities (individual counseling through CHVs) and supervised selected interviews.  Read more about her experience.

2022

The Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health awarded the first scholarships in May 2022 to two students who went to Chad with International Rescue Committee (IRC) and PopFam's RAISE Initiative: Aminata Diarra and Theodora Varelis. 

Aminata and Theodora worked with International Rescue Committee-Chad's Protection, Gender and Health (ProGeSan) program in partnership with RAISE and Université de N’Djamena. Theodora and Aminata supported two research studies in 2 refugee camps in Wadi-Fira, Chad: one focused on person-centered maternity care and the other on adolescent sexual and reproductive health. Here they are digitizing information gathered on a flip chart created by adolescents during a series of participatory research activities on sexual and reproductive health at Kounoungou refugee camp. Read more about their experience.