Recipients
Congratulations to the 2026 C-ARCH award recipients!
Master's APEx stipend
Sophie Couper, Department of Population and Family
Sophie is working with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Maldives team on two key projects:
1) Sophie is helping to develop a set of practical guidelines for ensuring Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare (SRH) is maintained and prioritised during emergencies, as part of the National Emergency Operation Plan. This involves learning about specific challenges and concerns in the Maldives, including climate-related challenges, with increasingly extreme weather events. I am working with local partners to support their work. We are aiming to build a more resilient plan to protect this important care which includes but is not exclusive to maternity care, sexual violence, HIV, STI transmission, and contraception access, ensuring robust EmONC/Maternal health referral pathways during climate-related emergencies.
2) She is helping a local team of gynaecologists conduct an audit of caesarean sections and to develop national, evidence-based guidelines. A request of the Ministry of Health, in response to increasingly high rates, an issue evolving around the world.
Shane Araujo, Department of Environmental Health Sciences
Shane Araujo is completing his Applied Practice Experience with Fresh Life in Nairobi, Kenya, supporting the organization's advisory team in strengthening off-grid sanitation systems across Kenya and other African contexts. His work focuses on applied research, systems analysis, and stakeholder engagement to develop scalable, data-driven sanitation solutions for government and NGO partners. Through this experience, he is contributing to climate-resilient approaches to sanitation that improve environmental health, reduce infectious disease risk, and expand equitable access to safe sanitation in underserved urban and peri-urban communities.
Doctoral travel award
Sabah Usmani, Department of Environmental Health Sciences
Sabah attended ISEE 2026 in Munich and had the opportunity to present a poster from her dissertation research, titled “Urban Intensity, Auto Dependence, and Ambient Air Pollution: Association between the Built Environment–Traffic (BETR) Index and Air Pollution in New York City.” The conference was a wonderful opportunity to connect with researchers working at the intersection of the built environment, climate, and health.
Yanran Li, Department of Biostatistics
Yanran attended the 2026 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM), where she presented her research on 'Spatially Adaptive Ensemble Learning with Calibrated Predictive Uncertainty.' The conference gave her the opportunity to share her work with researchers in statistics and environmental health, receive valuable feedback, and connect with others working on related methodological and applied problems. It also helped her refine how she communicates her research and think about its potential applications. The discussions and connections she made at JSM gave her new ideas for extending the work and reinforced her interest in pursuing a research career at the intersection of statistical methodology, environmental health, and data science.