We are excited to announce our new team of KEDU interns. Check our intern page for more.
Co-founder
Dr. Yvonne Kamau, MD, MBA was born in Gilgil, Kenya and graduated with a joint degree in medicine and business from the University of Kansas School of Medicine. She also received a Bachelor’s degree in Microbiology with honors and a co-major in International Studies focusing primarily on Africa and the Middle East. With a firm commitment to lending her skills towards caring for patients at the bedside, she is equally dedicated to concurrently applying an analytical, research-based angle in addressing the social issues that impede vulnerable populations from achieving good health for themselves and their families. Her research interests include sustainable healthcare solutions in low resource settings and the use of mobile technology in circumventing limited healthcare access. Her passion for discovery has led her to her current role, working with HIV positive pregnant women, their sero-exposed infants and their healthcare providers at 4 research sites across Kenya (Nakuru Provincial General Hospital, Tudor Sub-County Hospital, Kisumu County Hospital (KCH) and Kombewa District Hospital) that recently concluded a pilot study testing the implementation of newly approved point-of-care (POC) HIV testing platforms in Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission (PMTCT) clinics with the goal of further expediting diagnosis and initiation of treatment. Her work is part of a collaborative partnership between the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI), The University of Kansas School of Medicine and Global Health Innovations (GHI). She is the founder of My Afrika My Voice and serves on the Strategy Board for the Harambe Entrepreneur Alliance, a network of highly educated young African entrepreneurs from leading universities across the world spearheading social and business ventures across Africa. Previously, she served as a Global Ambassador for Empowering a Billion Women by 2020 and locally served on the Board of Directors for the Douglas County AIDS project.
Send us a message with “KMA/ MSAKE/ KEDU mentorship initiative” in the body of the message if you are interested in becoming a mentor or being mentored.
Send us a message with “US-based mentorship initiative” if you are a US-based physician or physician in-training interested in becoming a mentor or being mentored.
Creator and Founder
Christine Ngaruiya, MD, MSc, DTM&H is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine (DEM) at Yale University. She completed the Global Health and International Emergency Medicine fellowship in the DEM in 2015, also matriculating with a Master of Science and Diploma in Tropical Medicine and International Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine at that time. Her research interests center on: Non-Communicable Diseases, barriers to care, and community-based interventions with a particular focus on Africa. Some past honors include: the Emergency Medicine Resident’s Association (EMRA) Augustine D’Orta Award for outstanding community and grassroots involvement, Harambe Entrepreneur Alliance Associate and the 2014 Harambe Pfizer Fellow Award for social entrepreneurship, the 2016 University of Nebraska Outstanding International Alumnus award, the 2018 Young Physician award of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine, and the 2019 Yale School of Medicine Leonard Tow Humanism in Medicine for clinical excellence and compassionate care. She has held several leadership positions including with: the American Medical Students’ Association (AMSA), the Emergency Medicine Residents’ Association (EMRA), the Society of Academic Emergency Medicine’s (SAEM) Global Emergency Medicine Academy, and the Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH), the African Federation for Emergency Medicine (AFEM) and the Women Leaders in Global health Leadership conference. She is also a founding member of the Yale Network for Global Noncommunicable Disease (NGN). She has served on a number of NIH panels related to global NCD topics, and has lectured both nationally and internationally on the same. She most recently was a senior contributor to the Kenya Ministry of Health, leading a WHO-validated national cross-sectional study assessing burden and risk factors for NCDs. Finally, she was selected as one of twenty Yale Public Voice Fellows for 2015-2016 from across campus with more than 20 publications in outlets such as Time, Huffington Post, Medium, and The Hill since that time.
Co-founder
Grace W. Wanjiku, MD, MPH is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Rhode Island Hospital/ Brown University. She completed medical school at Yale School of Medicine, and Emergency Medicine residency training at the Brown University Emergency Medicine Residency Program. She undertook a two-year fellowship in Emergency Ultrasound at Yale University, including an MPH in global health at the Yale School of Public Health.
Grace’s interests include the creation and evaluation of point of care ultrasound training programs in low resource countries. She has participated in a novel program that trains health care providers in rural Kenya on the use of point of care ultrasound. She has also been involved in training providers at the ICU, Emergency and Anesthesia Departments at Aga Khan University Hospital Nairobi, Kenyatta National Hospital and Nairobi Hospital. She is involved in PoCUS curriculum development, training and evaluation projects across East Africa. Grace’s other interests include injury/ trauma training in low-income countries. She has collaborated with teams teaching trauma courses in Nicaragua and Rwanda. In 2015, she started a trauma course for graduating medical students at Moi College of Health Sciences in Eldoret, Kenya.
Co-founder
Dr. R. Muyoka Maina, MD, MHS, is a first-year general surgery resident in the Department of Surgery at Yale University. She grew up in Nairobi, Kenya, and immigrated to the USA for college. She completed her undergraduate education at Columbia University and graduated with a BA in biochemistry. She received both her medical degree and Masters in Health Science from Yale School of Medicine. While in medical school, she was awarded the prestigious Yale Endowment Research Fellowship to conduct translational surgery research in tissue engineering. Her research interests have been focused on the development of suitable bioprints that can serve as in vivo conduits for intestinal repairs and transplant grafts and the use of regenerative nanoparticles to abate ischemic intestinal injuries. She is passionate about global surgery and surgical education, and intends to specialize in surgical oncology upon completion of her residency. Dr. Maina is interested in academic surgery and intends to incorporate her love for science, mentorship, and clinical practice into her career as a surgeon-scientist.
Co-founder
Dr. Stephen, MD Kimani is a board-certified internal medicine physician and a current fellow in Hematology/Oncology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He completed medical school at the University of Nairobi, Kenya and he is an alumnus of the Bachelor of Science in Human Anatomy program – an intercalated honors program reserved for distinguished preclinical medical students. He completed a medical officer internship and served as a medical officer in the Ministry of Health prior to relocating to the USA. He matriculated with a Master of Science in Global Health degree from Duke University (Durham, NC, USA) in 2014 where he was awarded the Outstanding Student Award for excellence in academics and community building. He completed internal medicine residency at Duke University Medical Center. Dr. Kimani has spent a great part of the past decade training and practicing in global health settings including Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa and USA. He has also authored several peer-reviewed publications. He is interested in health services research including, but not limited to, cancer care delivery and implementation science with focus on patient-reported outcomes (PROs), treatment outcomes, and digital technologies. He is a recipient of several professional awards and grants.
Co-founder
Dr. Chemtai Mungo, MD, MPH is an Ob/Gyn and clinical researcher who was born and raised in Kenya. She received a bachelor’s degree with Honors from the University of California in Berkeley and completed her medical school at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF).
At UCSF, she was a Doris Duke International Clinical Research Fellow and spent a year in Kisumu, Kenya working on cervical cancer prevention among HIV-infected women. She also completed a Master’s in Public Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and did a residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology in San Francisco. Dr. Mungo is passionate about using research, advocacy, and capacity-building to pursue equity in global women’s health. She is also passionate about advancing opportunities for leadership among African investigators in Global Health, particularly women. Her primary research is focused on increasing access to effective, evidence-based cervical cancer prevention in low-income countries, with the goal of elimination of this preventable cancer. She is currently a fellow at the University of California San Francisco where she continues to work on cervical cancer prevention in Western Kenya. Her work is supported by the National Institute of Health Fogarty Fellowship and the UCSF Cancer Center Global Cancer Research Award.
