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The Harriet Lane Pediatric Residency Program

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Global Health Pathway

Pediatric Residents with Dr. Nicole Shilkofski and Filipino physician colleagues in Cavite, Philippines.Pediatric Residents with Dr. Nicole Shilkofski and Filipino physician colleagues in Cavite, Philippines.

We aim to train pediatric leaders who will work in the field of global health to eliminate health disparities through advocacy, research, community partnership, education and clinical care.

While all residents in the program are encouraged to pursue overseas global health rotations during their PGY2 or PGY3 years, residents in the global health pathway will dedicate a minimum of two months of elective time during residency toward international rotations and development of a longitudinal capstone project at one field site.

In collaboration with their career adviser and pathway mentor, each resident will develop an individualized learning plan that provides an opportunity for faculty to connect them to specific institutional resources to enhance their professional career development within both pediatrics and global health. 

The five pillars of global health education will include:

  • A stateside curriculum
  • Pre-departure preparation
  • Global health elective experiences
  • Post-return debriefing
  • Curriculum evaluation, with a focus on capstone project development and implementation

Established field placements for electives currently exist in Malawi, Bangladesh, Lesotho, Nigeria, Kenya, Philippines, Myanmar, Uganda, Haiti and Peru, among many others available through the School of Public Health and Center for Global Health.

All residents in the pathway will complete pre-departure coursework through the Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health, which provides funding for many of the international elective experiences through the Paul S. Lietman Global Travel Grants for Residents.

Residents in the pathway are also eligible to take up to 16 credits per year of coursework through the school of public health. For example:

  • Foundations of International Health
  • Issues in the Reduction of Maternal and Neonatal Mortality in Low-Income Countries
  • Health Systems in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
  • Infectious Diseases and Child Survival
  • Child and Public Health in the Tropics

Residents will be expected to present their scholarly work and capstone projects at the annual School of Public Health Global Health Day and at international conferences, such as the annual meeting of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health (of which Johns Hopkins is a member).

Snapshots from Our Global Health Program

global health residents posing in front of maternal health poster
global health residents with Kenyan villagers
global health residents posing in front of ambulance
global health residents in Kenya, with a giraffe behind them
global health residents posing with a young Kenyan villager

Relationships and Collaborations

The global health pathway leverages relationships and collaborations across the Department of Pediatrics and the larger Johns Hopkins University community, including:

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

The Johns Hopkins University

Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Current Global Health Pathway Residents

Dr. Charlotte Gemes

Dr. Charlotte Gemes is a third year resident in the global health pathway whose interest in global health started while an undergraduate at the University of Virginia where she participated in a qualitative public health research program in Cape Town, South Africa. Following this, she conducted research in Kigali, Rwanda where she looked at what factors influence mothers’ decisions on whether to breastfeed their babies. She continued her global health interest in medical school at the University of Vermont where she rotated at a local federally qualified health center with a diverse patient population including immigrants from a variety of countries. She also participated in a pediatric rotation in Harare, Zimbabwe prior to graduation. She is undecided thus far in her career plans, but hopes to integrate work abroad.

Charlotte Gemes

Dr. Dilys Osei

Dr. Dilys Osei is a third year resident who was born in Accra, Ghana and became interested in global health at a young age after witnessing disparities within her family's community in Ghana in terms of limited and delayed access to care in rural villages. She was involved in local global health initiatives during her undergraduate education at Emory University where she helped refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo assimilate into the United States. Her global health interests during residency and longitudinally include improving access to care and the timely and safe transportation of critically ill patients to health care facilities in limited resource settings. 

Dr. Dilys

Dr. Rachel David

Dr. Rachel David is a second year resident in the global health pathway whose interest in global health and health equity started early in life after seeing health disparities in India. Throughout undergrad, she worked with Refugee Services of Texas and a local refugee health clinic where she conducted research on refugees' perceived and actual accessibility to health care. She worked in local clinics in South American countries where she saw the importance and impact of health education. She pursued a MPH during medical school where she worked with Physicians for Human Rights, specifically with projects related to improving access to resources for refugees from Afghanistan. Her interests include incorporating public health to improve health accessibility and communication globally.

Dr. Rachel David

Dr. Taylor Walters

Dr. Taylor Walters is a second year resident in the global health pathway whose interest in global health first started when she was working for the International Rescue Committee, a refugee resettlement agency in Charlottesville and Richmond, Virginia, prior to medical school. Through this role she worked with humanitarian migrants from around the world and developed a passion for working with children with complex medical needs and helping their families navigate the US healthcare system. Dr. Walters also pursued global health research during her Masters in Public Health at UVA through a qualitative project in Khayelitsha, South Africa focused on understanding the lived experience of individuals with chronic disease. As a medical student at VCU, Dr. Walters was involved in the underserved pathway that afforded her the opportunity to work with vulnerable populations in urban and rural settings, culminating in a capstone project on smoking prevalence amongst Hispanic migrant farmworkers on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. As a pediatric global health resident, she is interested in improving education in refugee health and research regarding capacity building for maternal-child health in resource poor areas

Dr. Taylor Walters

Dr. Abbey Nishikawa

Dr. Abbey Nishikawa is a current intern in the Global Health Pathway. Her interest in global health began during college, where she served as an intern helping to coordinate a medical mission trip to Latin America for students at the Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine. She also minored in Spanish, with the goal of better communicating with Spanish-speaking patients both in the U.S. and abroad. During medical school, she completed a month-long rotation in Kijabe, Kenya, working with a pediatric surgical team. There, she participated in surgeries and outpatient clinics for children with complex medical and surgical needs. The experience underscored the importance of access to care, continuity of follow-up, and community engagement in improving health outcomes in rural settings. While she is still exploring which specialty to pursue, Dr. Nishikawa is committed to incorporating global health into her future career and hopes to work abroad.
Abbey Nishikawa

Health Equity and Advocacy Pathway

text hereHealth Equity and Advocacy Pathway leadership and residents at Welcome Ice Cream Social

We envision a world where every child, regardless of their background, has the opportunity to reach their full potential. We aim to train pediatric leaders who will work to eliminate health disparities through advocacy, research, community partnership, education and clinical care.

The Harriet Lane Pediatric Residency Program has been building leaders in the field of pediatrics for more than 100 years. With a combination of innovative curricula, a world-class faculty, robust clinical experiences, and opportunities for independence and team leadership, our program has an international reputation for providing exceptional pediatric training. Located in East Baltimore, the program also has a long-standing commitment to serving and advocating for children and families in our local community as well as nationally.

To train leaders in health equity, the program will leverage world-renowned resources across Johns Hopkins to provide graduates with a unique skill set that will equip them to make an impact for children affected by health disparities. 

Relationships and Collaborations

The health equity/urban health pathway will leverage relationships and collaborations across the department and the institution, including:

Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

The Johns Hopkins University

The three pillars of the pathway are mentorship, advocacy and skill building, and scholarship.

Pillars of the Program

The three pillars of the Health Equity pathway are mentorship, advocacy and skill building and scholarship.

In addition to the foundational experiences of the Harriet Lane Pediatric Residency Program, the health equity/urban health pathway will offer the following opportunities and tailored curriculum:

Mentorship: Residents in this pathway will receive longitudinal mentorship from accomplished Johns Hopkins faculty members who are actively engaged in addressing problems of health equity. Over the first six months, residents will work with program leadership to build a longitudinal mentorship and scholarship oversight team based on their individual interests and institutional areas of focus.

Advocacy and skill building: Residents will work with their mentors and program leadership to develop an individualized learning plan that will leverage continuity clinic and elective time in all three years of residency to build a foundation of skills that will prepare them for careers in this area. Potential examples include:

  • Courses and workshops at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
  • Advocacy rotations at the national, state and city level
  • International/global health advocacy rotations including:
    • Clinical immersion experiences — Nigeria, Guyana, Solomon Islands, Kenya
    • Malnutrition camp experiences — Haiti
    • Medical education research collaborations — Philippines
    • Global health research opportunities — Lesotho, Bangladesh, Malawi
  • Community pediatric experiences serving diverse populations, including
    • The Harriet Lane Clinic — pediatric and adolescent clinics (winner of the 2013 Academic Pediatric Association Health Care Delivery Award)
    • Intensive Primary Care Clinic — for children and adolescents with or affected by HIV
    • Children’s Medical Practice, Bayview
    • Center for Addiction and Pregnancy, Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center
    • Johns Hopkins Community Physicians (East Baltimore Medical Center, Remington and other sites)
    • Home visitation during community hospital medicine rotation at St. Agnes Hospital
  • Electives working with high-risk and underserved populations in Baltimore and other locations (e.g., Latino health elective; Baltimore Child Abuse Center; community health elective; school-based health elective at the Rales Center; Indian Health Service elective in Tuba City, Arizona; international adoption elective; refugee health with International Rescue Committee)
  • Opportunities to network and collaborate with health equity-focused peers from the Medicine-Pediatrics Urban Health Residency Program and the urban health internal medicine primary care pathway

Scholarship: Residents will work with their mentors to develop a scholarly capstone project related to health equity and/or underserved urban populations, which will be completed over the course of the residency. Elective time in the PGY (postgraduate year) 2 and PGY3 can be dedicated to this project. Presentation of this scholarship at national meetings in the PGY3 is encouraged and is a goal of this program.

We encourage residents to consider the vast resources at the institution and to work with an existing research or advocacy team to implement their project.

Resources

We encourage residents to consider the vast resources at the institution and to work with an existing research or advocacy team to implement their project. A sample of recent work from our faculty in this area includes:

Current Health Equity and Advocacy Residents

Dr. Jaz-munn Johnson 

Dr. Jaz-munn Johnson is a third year in the Health Equity and Advocacy Pathway. He plans to specialize in Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine and has a special interest in at-risk, justice-involved youth (JIY) and the health/wellness impacts of youth incarceration. While in medical school, he co-founded an organization that sought to improve the continuity of medical care for re-entrant youth. This advocacy work fueled his residency Quality Improvement project here at Johns Hopkins, where he is working to improve the screening, documentation and referral practices for youth with a history/risk of legal system involvement. Along with these projects, he has helped to revamp the ACE, PCE, and trauma focused educational modules for our ambulatory curriculum, which is an area of medical education that he is particularly passionate about. Ultimately, he hopes to continue his juvenile-justice health-services research/advocacy to help bring about public policy reform.

Jaz-munn Johnson

Dr. Molly Kuehn

Dr. Molly Kuehn is a third-year resident in the Health Equity and Advocacy Pathway. Recognizing gaps in resident training around community resources, her primary residency research project focused on creating and evaluating an education intervention to strengthen resident knowledge on the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). She also serves as the program’s resident delegate to the Maryland and National AAP. Her interests include addressing inequities and expanding access to care within pediatric hematology/oncology.
Molly Kuehn

Dr. Mikaela Gold 

Dr. Mikaela Gold is a second-year resident in the Health Equity and Advocacy Pathway, whose commitment to health equity is shaped by witnessing the inequities her own family and friends have faced within the healthcare system. Growing up in Alabama and later living in Mississippi, she was surrounded by peers who experienced infant loss—all Black women. These firsthand experiences fueled her passion for addressing disparities in infant health. Although the national infant mortality rate has declined, the disparity gap continues to widen among certain racial and ethnic groups and in specific geographic regions. As a medical student at Meharry Medical College, an HBCU with a mission to serving the underserved, Dr. Gold worked with the pediatric clinic alongside the Tennessee Department of Health in community-based wraparound clinics dedicated to neighborhoods in Nashville with the highest infant mortality rates. These experiences have translated into her interest in neonatal and infant health. She also has a passion for mentoring youth and future physicians.
Mikaela Gold

Dr. Pranav Nandan 

Dr. Pranav Nandan is a second-year resident in the Health Equity and Advocacy Pathway, interested in access to food and immigrant/refugee healthcare. He strongly believes that the health of a child is inseparable from the health of their community. Through the Health Equity and Advocacy Pathway he appreciates having dedicated time and opportunities to positively impact the Baltimore community on both an individual and systemic level.
Pranav Nandan

Dr. Nikita Sardana 

Dr. Nikita Sardana is an intern in the Health Equity and Advocacy Pathway who is interested in cultural disparities within pediatric and maternal healthcare. She majored in anthropology as an undergraduate at Georgetown, where she had her first introduction to the field of medical anthropology, which seeks to understand how cultures and societies interact differently with our healthcare system. She conducted ethnographic research in maternal mortality rates for patients of color in the DC area, where she investigated how we can better improve cross-cultural understanding between healthcare providers and patients to improve outcomes. In medical school in Orlando, Florida, she continued to work on issues of reproductive health justice in underserved areas, especially in the adolescent population, and was involved in educating medical students on delivering comprehensive and culturally sensitive contraceptive care. She was also involved in the development of a period pantry supplying free menstrual hygiene products to adolescents with menstrual disorders. Her interests remain broad as she investigates what lights her up in residency, but she is excited to continue fighting for marginalized communities, both close to Baltimore and afar.
Nikita Sardana

Dr. Ariel Vilidnitsky 

Dr. Ariel Vilidnitsky is a first-year resident who is interested in health disparities impacting patients with chronic gastrointestinal disorders. As a medical student at Hopkins, he first became interested in health equity through his research with the Adolescent Medicine division on access to HIV testing for youth in Tampa Bay, Florida. This public health scholarship was complemented by his participation in community engagement projects, including volunteering as a crisis counselor for sexual and gender diverse youth, teaching sexual education in local middle schools, and assisting with medical evaluations for immigrants seeking asylum in the US. He is also interested in medical education as a form of advocacy. Prior to residency, he conducted research evaluating the Johns Hopkins internal medicine and medicine-pediatrics urban health residency curricula and helped develop a session on counseling adolescents questioning their gender identity for the medical school's pediatrics clerkship. He aspires to a career in pediatric gastroenterology, an interest he developed through a medical school elective that exposed him to disparities in access to nutritious meals, medications for inflammatory bowel disease, and liver transplantation among GI patients from underserved backgrounds.
Ariel Vilidnitsky

Medical Education Pathway

The goal of the Medical Education Pathway is to develop academic educators who are leaders in medical education research, administration, and teaching.  We leverage the robust education resources throughout the University and partner with the Osler and Bayview Medicine Residency Medical Education Pathway to offer immersive educational experiences in the six core domains of Medical Education: Teaching and facilitating learning; Program and curriculum development; Assessment and evaluation; Scholarship; Mentoring, coaching and advising; Educational leadership and administration and Career development. Pathway residents will participate in a 2-week elective during the beginning of their JAR year, followed by quarterly seminars and Works in Progress sessions.

Each participant will be matched with a primary education mentor as well as specific content mentors, as needed, and will be expected to complete a medical education scholarly project prior to graduation.

Upon completion of the pathway, participants will be able to:

  • Use multiple teaching modalities to teach health professional trainees and practicing health professionals across various learning environment
  • Develop, implement, and evaluate curricula
  • Develop and disseminate scholarly work related to medical education
  • Describe core concepts in education science
  • Describe medical education career pathways
  • Create a personal education portfolio for career advancement

Current Medical Education Pathway Residents

Dr. Gillean Connolly 

Dr. Gillean Connolly is a third-year resident in the Medical Education Pathway. She initially became interested in medical education during medical school, where she developed and implemented a health systems science curricula focused on teaching topics related to high-value care and quality improvement to medical students. While in residency, she has focused on improving resident education surrounding palliative care topics, including a specific focus on communication skills. She is currently applying to neonatology fellowship, and she hopes to continue to incorporate medical education into her future career.
Gillean Connolly

Dr. Lucy Murnane 

Dr. Lucy Murnane is a third-year resident in the Medical Education Pathway. Lucy’s interest in education was initially sparked while working as an organic chemistry TA in college. This interest blossomed further when she joined Teach for America and taught middle school science for two years after graduation. During medical school, she led the Humanism Symposium, a discussion-based elective course for first- and second-year medical students focused on the intersection of medicine with topics such as health equity and end-of-life experiences. Lucy is currently interested in a pediatrician’s role in navigating school-based accommodations such as IEPs and 504s with patients and families. She is excited to continue to explore this passion in her future career in primary care. 
Lucy Murnane

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