Our Team

Clarisa Bencomo
Associate Director

Clarisa Bencomo is an expert on human rights, governance, and philanthropy, with an interest in how global, national, and hyper local systems and practices can be reimagined to promote greater equity. Before joining the School of Public Health in 2021 she was an advisor to GHJG and taught International Development in the University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. From 2010 through 2018 she developed and led governance programming for the Ford Foundation’s MENA Regional Office in Cairo. Her programming at Ford included support for participatory planning and budgeting to address spatial inequality; research and capacity-building to advance accountability for service provision; documentation and advocacy for policies that are inclusive of migrants and refugees; and regional learning networks and platforms around law and society, post-conflict recovery, and equitable urbanism. In addition to her work in philanthropy, she had a long career as a researcher and advocate on human rights and aid effectiveness, including more than a decade as a researcher at Human Rights Watch based in Cairo and New York. 

Core GHJG Faculty

Terry McGovern, JD

Adjunct Professor, Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health and Professor and

Senior Associate Dean for Academic and Student Affairs, CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy

Terry McGovern is Professor and Senior Associate Dean for Academic and Student Affairs, CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, as well as Adjunct Professor in the Mailman School of Public Health. From 2017 to 2023 she served as Harriet and Robert H. Heilbrunn Professor and Chair in the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health as well as founding Director of the Global Health Justice and Governance Program. Previously, Ms. McGovern founded the HIV Law Project in 1989 and she served as its executive director until 1999. Ms. McGovern successfully litigated numerous cases against the federal, state and local governments including S.P. v. Sullivan which forced the Social Security Administration to expand HIV-related disability criteria so that women and other excluded individuals could qualify for Medicaid and social security, and T.N. v. FDA, which eliminated a 1977 FDA guideline restricting the participation of women of childbearing potential in early phases of clinical trials. As a member of the National Task Force on the Development of HIV/AIDS Drugs, she authored the 2001 federal regulation authorizing the FDA to halt any clinical trial for a life threatening disease that excludes women. From 2006 until 2012, she was Senior Program Officer in the Gender, Rights and Equality Unit of the Ford Foundation. Her research focuses on health and human rights, sexual and reproductive rights and health, gender justice, and environmental justice, with publications appearing in journals including Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, Health and Human Rights, and the Journal of Adolescent Health. Ms. McGovern recently co-edited Women and Girls Rising: Rights, Progress and Resistance: A Global Anthology. She has served on the Standing Lancet Commission on Adolescent Health and Wellbeing and the UCL-Lancet Commission on Migration and Health, and currently serves as a member of the UNFPA Global Advisory Council and the UNAIDS Human Rights Reference Group.

A. Kayum Ahmed, PhD, LLM, MA, MSt
Assistant Professor, Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health

Kayum Ahmed's research focuses on human rights, vaccine justice, and decolonizing the global health architecture. He also co-leads the Health and Human Rights Certificate. Before joining Columbia, Dr. Ahmed served as Division Director at the Open Society Foundations (OSF) Public Health Program where he worked on ensuring equitable global access to Covid-19 vaccines. He also has taught classes on socio-economic rights and decoloniality at Columbia Law School. Dr. Ahmed served as Chief Executive Officer of the South African Human Rights Commission from 2010 to 2015, where he led a team of 178 colleagues mandated to monitor, protect, and promote human rights in South Africa. Under his leadership the Commission investigated 45,000 human rights cases on issues such as the right to water, health and education, as well as cases pertaining to discrimination based on race, sexual orientation and disability, among others. He holds degrees in education from Columbia University, law degrees from the universities of Oxford, Cape Town, and Leiden; as well as degrees in anthropology and theology.

Juliana A. Bol, PhD, MPH

Assistant Professor, Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health

Juliana Bol works on evaluating the effectiveness, efficiency and impact of health system strengthening (HSS) approaches in complex conflict-affected and fragile settings. Her work seeks to extend the methodological toolkit used in the health systems research space to estimate program and policy effectiveness and/or impact using observational data, including by applying contract theory to improve accountability and service delivery. She has experience working in monitoring and evaluation and in quality improvement of maternal and child health HSS programs, primarily in South Sudan. She is also currently working on innovative arts, visual and narrative storytelling approaches to enhance the well-being of children affected by armed conflict and displacement in Northern Uganda, and Ethiopia; and supporting donor efforts to strengthen feminist climate justice movements in the Pacific Islands, Caribbean, and African continent.  

Samantha Garbers, PhD, MPA

Associate Professor, Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health

Samantha Garbers works with a diverse range of clinical- and community-based stakeholders to develop, adapt, implement, and evaluate innovative interventions to improve public health for diverse populations including sexual and gender minority youth and adults, adolescent males and women seeking reproductive health care, Latinx and Black communities, and individuals with limited health literacy. Using her training as an epidemiologist, Dr. Garbers works with stakeholders to integrate rigorous methods for process and outcome evaluation into interventions, with a focus on reproductive health and adolescent health. She serves as Co-Principal Investigator of an NIMHD-funded study to develop and test an intervention integrating mind-body integrative health approaches with sleep hygiene to improve sleep among teens served in school-based health centers (SBHCs) in NYC. She is also leading a study assessing experiences with receiving contraceptive care using telehealth among adolescents served by SBHCs, and research on factors affecting NIH support for transdisciplinary research at the nexus of environmental exposures and Black and Indigenous maternal and infant mortality.

Dr. Garbers engages in educational research focusing on engagement and learning outcomes in collaboration with the Digital Learning Studio and Columbia's SOLER Initiative. In the community, her work includes collaborating with hospital- and community-based providers to assess community needs and assets and articulate, refine, and evaluate community & population health programs. At Mailman, Dr. Garbers teaches Quantitative Data Analysis; Planning, Managing & Communicating for Evidence-Based Public Health; and Program Planning & Evaluation; she also serves as Curriculum Director for the Department and the Co-Lead for the Public Health Research Methods certificate.

Stephanie Grilo, PhD, MA
Assistant Professor, Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health

Stephanie Grilo, PhD, whose pronouns are she/her/hers, is an Assistant Professor in the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health at the Mailman School of Public Health. Dr. Grilo is a social scientist and public health researcher whose research area of interest focuses on adolescent health, globally and domestically, and emphasizes the need for taking a resiliency approach to improving health outcomes for vulnerable populations. This includes work on understanding multiracial identify formation and the influence on health outcomes, adolescent preventive services, comprehensive sexual health education and its role in preventing sexual assault, pregnancy outcomes for young women of color, as well as global research on fertility decision making in areas of high HIV prevalence. Dr. Grilo co-teaches Qualitative Methods in the Core Curriculum as well as in Population and Family Health. Dr. Grilo is also the co-founder of MOSAIC (Mentoring of Students and Igniting Community) a faculty and student mentorship community for first generation and students of color in the Department.

Goleen Samari, PhD, MPH, MA
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health and Associate Professor of Population and Public Health Sciences, USC Keck School of Medicine Department of Population and Public Health Sciences

Goleen Samari is a public health demographer whose research focuses on social inequities and health. Taking a health justice approach, she examines how racism, gender inequities, and migration-based inequities and xenophobia shape population health both domestically and globally with a particular focus on communities in or from the Middle East and North Africa. She largely focuses on issues related to immigrant health, women's health, and sexual and reproductive health and rights. Building on the legacy of structural racism and health scholars, she was the first to draw attention to racialization of religious minorities and Islamophobia as a public health issue. She is also one of a handful of public health researchers examining women's empowerment and reproductive health in the Middle East and North Africa. Her research remains focused on understanding and alleviating intersectional structural determinants of health. Cutting across all her research areas is an interest in the way social science constructs are measured and mixed methods that guide the research process. Her work also aims to bridge the gap between research and policy, making research accessible for wide audiences. Her research has been published in several journals including Social Science & Medicine and the American Journal of Public Health, and her editorials and Op-Eds have been published in local and national newspapers. She is privileged to be recognized as a thought leader on the health effects of discrimination and to have received a few notable honors for her contributions to health equity research.

Affiliate Faculty 

Sara Casey, DrPH 
Assistant Professor, Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health

Marina Catallozzi, MD, MSCE
Associate Professor, Pediatrics and Population and Family Health at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center
Director, General Public Health Program

Chelsea Clinton, DPhil, MPH
Vice Chair, The Clinton Foundation
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management

Kelli Stidham Hall, PhD, MS
Associate Professor, Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health

Micaela Martinez, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Biology, Emory University
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health

Other Affiliates

Emily Battistini, MD, MPH, MA