Meet The Team
Core Leadership
Dr. Juliet Iwelunmor
Associate Professor
Dr. Iwelunmor is an implementation scientist and an Associate Professor in Behavioral Science and Health Education. She has led a multi-center stepped-wedge randomized controlled trial (UH3HD096929) conducted across 32 sites in Nigeria and has a strong track record of NIH funding to address uptake and sustainability of evidence-based health interventions in diverse populations.1 Her training in human development and family studies and methods and expertise in implementation science is broadly applicable to adolescent and women health outcomes including implementation and dissemination methods, and youth participatory research methods. She has published extensively on women’s health and crowdsourcing approaches for health promotion in sub-Saharan Africa. She has an excellent record of NIH funding to implement pragmatic trials for in sub-Saharan Africa.
Dr. Joseph Tucker
Physician & Social Scientist
Dr. Tucker is an infectious diseases physician and social scientist with a special interest in crowdsourcing and related participatory methods. He is also an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel-Hill and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Dr. Tucker brings the expertise of crowdsourcing to the project. He has led several randomized controlled trials, including stepped wedge RCTs that evaluated the effectiveness of crowdsourced interventions, co-created by youth.
Dr. Oliver Ezechi
Obstetrician & Gynecologist
Dr. Ezechi is a trained Obstetrician and Gynecologist and is the Director of Research at the Nigerian Institute of Medical Research,where he oversees clinical research protocols. He has overseen numerous federal grants including NIH and CDC grants. He has extensive experience in the execution of clinical research protocols in community-based settings. He has also worked extensively on projects on cervical cancer prevention and management in Nigeria.
Meet The Team
Co-Program Faculty
Dr. Collins Airhihenbuwa
Professor
Dr. Collins Airhihenbuwa is a Professor of Health Management & Policy and leads the Global Research Against Non-communicable Disease (GRAND) Initiative at the School of Public Health at Georgia State University. He is an expert in creating solutions to promote health equity in national and global health and has more than 30 years of experience advancing research on culture, identity and health to inform strategies for training young professionals to conduct health behavior and public health research and intervention. He was previously Dean of the College for Public Health and Social Justice at Saint Louis University in Missouri and authored a cultural model (PEN-3) that is used in several countries to develop programs and interventions to address health inequity. He has served as a visiting scholar to UN agencies such as the World Health Organization and major universities, including Purdue and Boston University, and has served on boards of Saint Louis City and Hospitals, the National Advisory committee of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Scholars, the Global Philanthropy Alliance, and the board of Scientific Counselors for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Airhihenbuwa has authored more than 130 articles and book chapters and seven books, including “Health and Culture, Beyond the Western Paradigm” in 1995, “Healing Our Differences, the Crisis of Global Health and Politics of Identity” in 2007, and his most recent, “Health, Culture and Place: From the Tree to the Forest” in 2022. He is a former President and Distinguished Fellow of the Society for Public Health Education (SOPHE) and a fellow of the American Academy of Health Behavior and the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research. He is also the recipient of several prestigious awards including the Scholar of the Year by the American Association of Health Education, the symbol of H.O.P.E award by the American Journal of Health Promotion, the Outreach award by Penn State University, the David Satcher award for leadership in reducing health disparities by CDC and DHPE, and the Mentor award by SOPHE.
Dr. Jason. Ong
Associate Professor
Associate Professor Dr. Jason Ong is an academic sexual health specialist and health economist based at Melbourne Sexual Health Centre. His research focuses on economic evaluations and demand creation strategies to improve the uptake of HIV and sexually transmitted infection (STI) testing and management services. He is a board director of several peak HIV/STI organizations in Australia (ASHM, AFAO, ASHRA) and is involved in several committees at the World Health Organization working towards the elimination of HIV/STIs as a public health threat.
Dr. Ucheoma Nwaozuru
Assistant Professor
Ucheoma Nwaozuru, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Implementation, Division of Public Health Sciences at Wake Forest School of Medicine. She received a Master’s in Community Health and Preventive Medicine from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a PhD in Public Health Studies from Saint Louis University, College for Public Health and Social Justice. Her research focuses on participatory and community-engaged research to promote the adoption and sustainability of evidence-based interventions. Her training and research experience has involved qualitative research methodology, community-based participatory research, crowdsourcing, and social innovations for health and the use of these principles to promote health equity, intervention adoption, and sustainability. She is a co-investigator on the Innovative Tools to Expand HIV Self-Testing (ITEST) project in Nigeria (MPI: Iwelunmor, Tucker, and Ezechi) that uses crowdsourcing open calls to promote the uptake of HIV self-testing among Nigerian youth. In this capacity, she facilitates the youth advisory board meetings and assists with implementing the crowdsourcing open call activities for Nigerian youth.
Dr. Hong Xian
Professor
Dr. Hong Xian is a Professor of Biostatistics in the Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, Saint Louis University College for Public Health and Social Justice. He received an MS degree in Mathematics from Western Illinois University, Macomb, IL, in 1989 and a PhD degree in Mathematics from Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, in 1994. He was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship and received training in statistical genetics and biostatistics at Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO, from 1994 to 1997. Dr. Xian became a faculty member at Washington University School of Medicine in 1997 and joined the Saint Louis University faculty in 2012.
Dr. Jennifer Smith
Professor
Dr. K. Ajenifuja
Professor
Dr. B. Azogu
Epidemiologist
Dr. L. Zhang
Associate Professor
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