Leadership & Staff

Robert Murphy, MD, is professor of medicine and biomedical engineering, the John P. Phair Professor of Infectious Diseases, executive director of the Havey Institute for Global Health and interim chief, Division of Infectious Diseases at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. He is a member of the Sigma Xi Research Honor Society and a fellow in the Chicago Institute for Medicine and the American Institute for Medicine and Biological Engineering.   

Dr. Murphy’s primary research and clinical interest is in viral infections. His research includes drug development of new antiretroviral drugs and vaccines for HIV and viral hepatitis as well as the scale-up of therapy and point-of-care diagnostics for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, cancers and emerging infectious diseases in sub-Saharan Africa. He is principal investigator for several of Northwestern’s National Institutes for Health (NIH)/Fogarty International Center research training grants and one NIH cooperative agreement, the Center for Innovation in Point-of-Care Technologies for HIV/AIDS and Emerging Infections at Northwestern (C-THAN) based in Nigeria, Mali, Tanzania, Senegal and South Africa.  

Dr. Murphy has been working with Malian, Nigerian and South African medical scientists for the past twenty-one years, primarily on NIH-funded projects involving HIV and its co-morbidities. He has been the primary United States mentor for two of Mali’s and one of Nigeria’s NIH Emerging Leader awardees, Drs. Djeneba Dabitao, Djeneba Fofana and Jonah Musa. In 2017, he was awarded the Prix du Partenariat, Université des Sciences, des Techniques et des Technologies de Bamako.   

He is a member of multiple medical societies including the Infectious Disease Society of America, the American Society for Microbiology, the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (BSAC), the European AIDS Clinical Society and the European Association for the Study of Liver Disease. He sits on the boards of several non-profit organizations, including the Drucker Family Charitable Trust and Fondation Health and Research Organisation (Senegal). He is an Advisor to the NIH Fogarty International Center and member of the NIBIB Rapid Acceleration for Diagnostics (RADx) Tech III High Performance Steering Panel and RADx HIV Viral Load Panel.  

Murphy has published more than 350 scientific papers and launched the Biomedical Engineering for Africa textbook, which will publish its second edition in 2026. He is senior editor-virology for the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy and is faculty director for the Northwestern Master of Science in Global Health on-line graduate program. In 2021, he was named Mentor of the Year by Feinberg School of Medicine.  

r-murphy@northwestern.edu

rhavey@nm.org

Achenbach is an associate professor of Preventive Medicine and Infectious Diseases in the Department of Medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine. Achenbach has clinical interests in the treatment of HIV infection and co-infections. He is currently participating in several research projects and training programs through the Havey Institute for Global Health, including PEPFAR Nigeria, NU AITRP and the Eramune study.

Achenbach's research interests and expertise are in clinical epidemiology of HIV treatment and co-morbidities in both the U.S and sub-Saharan Africa. He has ongoing research projects in the following areas: cancer among persons with HIV in the U.S. and sub-Saharan Africa, outcomes of TB-HIV co-infection in Nigeria, paradoxical immune reconstitution inflammatory syndromes and second-line treatment of HIV in Nigeria.

c-achenbach@northwestern.edu

Klein serves as the administrative director at the Havey Institute for Global Health. She is responsible for the effective operations of the institute's research and administrative activities as well as the development, oversight and management of international education in clinical medicine and research opportunities for Feinberg School of Medicine students. Klein oversees the integration of all international educational programs for Feinberg and is responsible for developing and maintaining the school’s global educational partnerships.

Prior to joining the institute, Klein worked on the Zika virus response at the American Academy of Pediatrics. She also worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the Vietnam country office and at headquarters in Atlanta on the Global Health Security Agenda. She also served as the associate director for the Program of African Studies at Northwestern.

Klein holds a master's of public health from Northwestern University and a master's degree in anthropology from American University.

kate.klein@northwestern.edu

Director of Global Clinical Outreach

• Work with IGH center and program directors and senior leadership to expand clinical outreach activities alongside international partners
• Meet and advise senior clinical faculty who may already have experience in global health (e.g. mission-style global health work) but are seeking to expand their work with international partners
• Meet and advise junior clinical faculty (e.g. alums of the McGaw Global Health Clinical Scholars program) who would like to embed global health work into their career
• Support faculty in the development of internal or external proposals to be submitted to IGH through guidance and mentoring

s-galvin@northwestern.edu

Doobay-Persaud graduated from Tufts University in 2002 with a combined major in biology and psychology. She then matriculated at Tufts University School of Medicine, where she earned her MD as a part of the BA/MD program. She completed a residency in traditional internal medicine at Yale New Haven Hospital. During medical school and residency, she provided clinical care in medicine and partnered with two NGOs, Himalayan Health Exchange on a longitudinal basis and in South Africa as a Yale Johnson and Johnson scholar in an ARV clinic. After completing residency, she participated as a physician volunteer at ASRI clinic in Borneo and partnered up with an NGO called Hillside Healthcare International, an NGO providing primary care in rural areas in Belize.

Currently, Dr. Doobay-Persaud is an associate professor in the Department of Medicine and Medical Education and is the Co-Director of the Center for Global Health Education at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine’s (NUFSM) Institute for Global Health. She developed and directs the McGaw Global Health Clinical Scholars program for residents and fellows, directs a Master of Science in Global Health (MSGH) degree program as well as overseeing the medical student global health electives. Her research area of interest is ethical practice in global health.

Doobay-Persaud is the assistant director of Global Health Graduate Education and the curriculum director for the Masters of Science in Global Health.

adoobay@northwestern.edu

Matt Glucksberg is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern University, and the Director of the Center for Innovation in Global Health Technologies. His technical expertise is in tissue mechanics, microcirculation, and optical instrumentation. His laboratory has developed photonics-based instrumentation to measure pressure and flow in the circulation of the eye, instruments to measure the response of pulmonary alveolar epithelial cells to their immediate mechanical environment, and is currently involved in developing minimally invasive optical biosensors for monitoring glucose, lactate, and other measures of metabolic function. He is a co-Founder of Northwestern’s Global Healthcare Technologies Program in Cape Town South Africa, co-director of an MS certificate program in Global and Ecological Health, and is working with the Center for Global Health at Feinberg to develop BME degree programs at three Universities in Nigeria.

Dr. Glucksberg is a member of the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, a Fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society, and serves as a founding board member for the Northwestern Global Health Foundation. 

m-glucksberg@northwestern.edu

Claudia Hawkins is a professor of Medicine-Infectious Diseases at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. Her specialty is Infectious Diseases with a focus on the care of individuals with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) infection and viral hepatitis B and C. As director of the Viral Hepatitis/HIV Co-infection Program within the Division of Infectious Diseases, she oversees the clinical management of patients with HIV and viral hepatitis B and C in a multidisciplinary outpatient clinic and teaches rotating fellows, residents and students.

Dr. Hawkins is principal and co-investigator on a number of epidemiological studies of HIV, Viral Hepatitis B and C, and Hepatocellular Carcinoma as well as trials investigating novel Hepatitis B therapeutic agents. Most of her research is conducted in Tanzania and Nigeria where she also provides technical and clinical guidance to large HIV care and treatment programs, and mentors junior faculty on HIV research through global health research training programs. She is currently principal investigator of a NIH Fogarty International Center (FIC) funded HIV research training grant on Patient Centered Outcomes Research.

c-hawkins@northwestern.edu

See Hou's biography on her faculty profile.

l-hou@northwestern.edu

Dr. Koralnik’s laboratory investigates how viruses affect the nervous system. These include the polyoma-virus JC (JCV), and the etiologic agent of progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML).  Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Koralnik has leveraged his expertise from the AIDS epidemic to offer insight and conduct research regarding how COVID-19 affects the nervous system.  His research team published the first study on the neurological complications in hospitalized COVID-19 patients in the US. In May 2020, Dr. Koralnik also created one of the first Neuro COVID-19 clinics in the country where he and his team investigate, diagnose and manage neurological symptoms of COVID-19 long haulers.  When he was at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Koralnik initiated in 2010 a Global Neurology research program at the University Teaching Hospital in Lusaka, Zambia. Over the years, this program has grown tremendously and has become a Multi-institutional consortium, the Zambia Institute for Neurological Care, Research, and Education (ZINCARE).

igor.koralnik@northwestern.edu

Sally McFall is the Co-director, Center for Innovation in Global Health Technologies (CIGHT) in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, as well as the Co-Director of the Administrative Core, MPI of C-THAN, and Director of the Technology Development/Refinement Core.

Dr. McFall has extensive experience in leading point-of-care technology development projects for infectious diseases such as HIV, tuberculosis, and hepatitis designed specifically for low and middle income countries. She recently founded a start-up company, Minute Molecular Diagnostics (M2Dx), with David Kelso and Kara Palamountain as co-founders, to market POC testing in high resource settings with the goal of developing applications for low resource settings as funding allows.

She received her PhD in microbiology and immunology from the University of Illinois, Chicago.

s-mcfall@northwestern.edu

Dr. Ozer received his PhD in Molecular Biology and his MD through the Medical Scientist Training Program at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. He joined the Physician Scientist Training Program at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in 2006 to perform his residency in Internal Medicine and fellowship in Infectious Disease before joining the faculty in 2012. His research focuses on genomic explorations of microbial pathogens and includes uncovering genetic determinants of virulence and antimicrobial resistance and exploring genomic features to investigate the transmission and evolution of bacterial, fungal, and viral pathogens. Since early 2020, Dr. Ozer has adapted his expertise to perform whole-genome sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 to track the population structure of the virus and study genomic correlations with clinical features in COVID-19 patients.

e-ozer@northwestern.edu

Lori Ann Post, PhD is the Buehler Professor of Emergency Medicine and Medical Social Sciences at the Feinberg School of Medicine. She is the inaugural Director of the Buehler Center for Health Policy and Economics. She moved from Michigan State (Assistant Prof and Research Dean), Yale University (Associate Prof and Research Director, Research Section Chief), and now full professor and center director at Northwestern University. She did her dissertation (Applied Demography) indirectly estimating the invisible population of elderly women being abused and exploited, funded by CDC. She was funded by the Center for Medicare to develop a background check system to vet the healthcare workforce for persons in long-term care. The state of Michigan is the only pilot state still using the system. Dr. Post wrote the legislation for “Best Practices in background checks for the Affordable Healthcare Act which appropriated $3,000,000 per state and territory to develop a system similar to Michigan. Dr. Post has also been funded by Medicaid to derive estimates of various types of abuse and disabilities. Dr. Post worked with Yale New Haven Health Care System to develop an App to screen for disabilities and to provide healthcare providers with a prognostic score of death, admit, and return to the ED at 30 days. This project is listed on AHRQ’s website as one of their successful studies. Dr. Post has been working in information technology or Informatics and violence prevention/intervention for the past 20 years including the first sexual assault surveillance system and a community based violence intervention - - both funded by CDC. Dr. Post is a seasoned researcher who utilizes unique mixed methods studies to address complex problems. Furthermore, she works on a line of research to mobilize Public Will to align with Political Will to reduce violence.

lori.post@northwestern.edu

Colleen Fant is an attending physician in emergency medicine at Lurie Children’s. After graduating from Northwestern University with a minor in global health, she spent a year in Ghana working on sexual health programming with a non-profit organization, then attended medical school at Tufts University School of Medicine and completed her residency at Massachusetts General Hospital for Children, followed by her emergency medicine fellowship at Lurie Children’s.

Fant has worked in the Department of Pediatrics co-leading trainee programming in global health and has served in leadership roles with the Center for Global Health Education, also a part of the Havey Institute for Global Health. She has been instrumental in growing a partnership between Lurie Children’s and Bugando Medical Center in Mwanza, Tanzania, as well as with Maseno University in Kisumu, Kenya. Her current work focuses on increasing accessibility of simulation based medical education in resource variable settings, as well as partnership-focused projects in ultrasound, pediatric trauma, and pediatric cardiology programming.

CFant@luriechildrens.org

Sahera Dirajlal-Fargo is an attending physician in infectious diseases at Lurie Children’s. She obtained her DO at the University of New England and completed a pediatrics residency at Phoenix Children’s Hospital. She spent a year working as a Pediatric AIDS Corps physician for the Baylor International Pediatric AIDS Initiative in Malawi. She also trained in Infectious Diseases at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC. Dirajlal-Fargo is a translational investigator, whose research portfolio focuses on complications of HIV in children and youth in the US and sub-Saharan Africa. She is the principal investigator on multiple NIH-funded studies in the United States and Africa to better understand the long-term health outcomes and chronic comorbidities associated with HIV in adults and children. She specializes in providing HIV care and treatment to infants, children, and adolescents both living with, and exposed to, HIV as well as all aspects of pediatric infectious diseases.

sdirajlalfargo@luriechildrens.org