Jennifer Schlecht Memorial Scholarship Fund
The Jennifer Schlecht Memorial Scholarship was created to honor Jennifer Schlecht’s life and legacy, with the goal of creating a group of highly trained, passionate public health leaders who are committed to championing the field of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) justice. (More about Jennifer’s remarkable achievements in developing humanitarian programs and advocacy for women’s and girls’ human rights is here.) The scholarship provides funding to select PopFam MPH students pursuing SRH Applied Practice Experiences (APEx) in fragile settings.
Current Students: The next round of applications will open in Spring 2024.
If you would like to donate to the scholarship fund, please click below.
2023 Recipients
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 Recipients
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.