PSP-One Staff

Ruth Berg, PHD
PSP-One Project Director

Dr. Ruth Berg, PSP-One's project director, has over eight years of professional experience in private sector reproductive health projects. Prior to PSP-One, she served as the director of Research, Monitoring and Evaluation on the USAID-funded Commercial Marketing Strategies (CMS) project. Dr. Berg worked closely with CMS regional and country managers to identify research topics that improved program effectiveness and operations. Dr. Berg received her BA in Economics from the University of California at Davis and her MA and PhD in Sociology/Demography from the University of Texas at Austin. She has worked in numerous countries, including Russia, Ghana, Morocco, LAC region, Turkey, and the United States.

Caroline Quijada
PSP-One Deputy Director, Africa Regional Director

Ms. Caroline Quijada is a public health specialist with over 10 years of experience working on health programs both domestically and overseas. Currently, Ms. Quijada is the Africa Regional Director for USAID’s Private Sector Partnerships One project, and is responsible for providing vision and direction for field support programs. Previously under the Partners for Health Reformplus (PHRplus) project, Ms. Quijada provided technical assistance in the following programmatic areas: health systems strengthening, contraceptive security, reproductive health, maternal health, and quality assurance. Domestic experience includes working on Hispanic health and well being in areas such as children’s health, HIV/AIDS, health care quality and welfare reform. Ms. Quijada is a native Spanish speaker, is proficient in French and has worked in Latin America, West Africa and Asia.

Sara Sulzbach, MPH
Director, Research, Monitoring and Evaluation

Ms. Sara Sulzbach has nearly fifteen years of experience in the health and education sectors, both domestically and internationally. She currently holds the dual positions of Research Director and Technical Advisor for Private Provider Networks for PSP-One. Ms. Sulzbach’s international health expertise includes implementation and evaluation of health projects, including private provider networks, community-based health financing, health systems strengthening, priority maternal and child health services and HIV/AIDS services. Ms. Sulzbach’s technical skills include all aspects of survey research, data analysis, qualitative research, monitoring and evaluation, and increasing the sustainability of private provider networks. Formerly the LAC Research, Monitoring and Evaluation (RME) Manager for the Commercial Market Strategies project, she oversaw all research, monitoring and evaluation activities in the region, including developing country M&E plans; designing and implementing evaluation research activities; and building capacity of local research firms. Prior to joining Abt Associates, Ms. Sulzbach worked for the University of North Carolina, evaluating reproductive health franchises in three developing countries and conducting research for the MEASURE Evaluation Project. Ms. Sulzbach received her Masters in Public Health from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill with a specialization in Maternal and Child Health, and is proficient in Spanish. She has worked in numerous developing countries, including Ethiopia, Zambia, Ghana, Pakistan, India, Bolivia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Mexico.

Dawn Crosby, MBA
Regional Director, Latin America and the Caribbean

Ms. Crosby is PSP-One's Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean. She has 15 years of business and NGO management experience; with 11 years in the development field. She specializes in strategic planning, operations and project management, business planning and development and non-profit management; including NGO creation, strategic alliances, organizational positioning, financial management, sustainability and board governance. She has provided technical assistance to NGOs dedicated to family planning and reproductive health and gender-based violence in Latin America and the US. She has founded and still serves on the board of a Maryland-based non-profit serving survivors of domestic violence. She has also served as a Corporate Director of Strategy, Planning and Development. Ms. Crosby received her BA in International Development from American University and a Global Executive MBA from the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC-Chapel Hill. She has the following country experience: Brazil, China, Egypt, Guatemala, Honduras, Iraq, Jordan, Mexico, Moldova, Nigeria, Paraguay and Poland.

Françoise Armand, MBA
Director of Social Marketing and Pharmaceutical Partnerships

Ms. Francoise Armand has over fifteen years experience in commercial consumer product marketing and social marketing for a wide range of health interventions, including HIV/AIDS prevention, family planning, and maternal and child health. She has provided technical assistance to over thirty field programs in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Asia, in the areas of product and services marketing and behavior change communication. Prior to becoming the director of social marketing and pharmaceutical partnerships for PSP-One, Ms. Armand served as a senior technical advisor for social marketing for the Commercial Market Strategies project. She helped develop and manage partnerships with pharmaceutical manufacturers and authored several technical papers on the subjects of social marketing, partnerships and sustainability. Ms Armand has an MBA from the University of Miami.


Barbara O’Hanlon, MPP
Senior Policy Advisor

PSP-One’s Senior Policy Advisor, Ms. Barbara O'Hanlon, is a recognized leader in international health policy and implementation with over 18 years experience in providing policy-related technical assistance in 20 countries spanning Latin America, Middle East, Africa and the former Soviet Union. Ms. O’Hanlon’s policy expertise focuses in advocacy and strategic communication to create favorable policy environments for key health issues, participatory and strategic planning to implement health policies at national and regional levels, and legal and regulatory analysis to identify policy constraints. In addition to her “hands-on” policy work in the field, she has developed and applied new policy tools and methodologies, and written and trained extensively in policy related areas such as strategic planning, stakeholder analysis, advocacy, strategic communication and change management. Ms. O’Hanlon has over 9 years of experience in senior management as a Vice President and Deputy Director for two USAID funded projects. After 15 years of working with increasing technical and management responsibility, Ms. O’Hanlon formed her own company to provide state-of-the-art technical assistance in health policy and management. Raised in Mexico and USA, she trained at UC Berkeley in Political Science and Harvard JF Kennedy School in Public Policy.

Neha Suchak, MS
Communications Director

Ms. Neha Suchak is the Communications Director for the PSP-One project. She manages strategic communications (online and print) which involves collaborating with partners and disseminating important information for the private sector health community to draw from. Prior to joining the PSP-One team, Ms. Suchak managed formative research, design, development, production and post-production of regional Behavior Change Communications campaigns, related to HIV/AIDS prevention, targeting youth in more than 20 African countries. She also developed training curricula to educate field staff on this process and re-branded the project to include web site, print, and knowledge management tools. Ms. Suchak has worked for the WHO where she managed the design and development of public outreach programs. Ms. Suchak received her BA in Sociology and certificate in Public Relations from McGill University in Canada and her MS in Health Communications and International Public Health from Boston University. She speaks French, Gujarati and is learning Spanish. She has worked in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Benin, Nigeria, Thailand and Guatemala.


Barbara Janowitz, PHD
Senior Economist

Dr. Barbara Janowitz has over 25 years of experience in health services research and health economics, and has developed and led FHI’s economics program for about 15 years. Dr. Janowitz is recognized as an expert in costing of reproductive health services. Her most recent experience includes research on the impact of price changes on service use; costs of different service delivery modalities in Bangladesh and community-based distribution in Tanzania; the impact of reduction of IUD revisits on health outcomes; and the costs of interventions to improve the quality of services. She participated in workshops on economic analysis in South Africa, Kenya, and the United States. Dr. Janowitz received a BA in Economics from the City College of the City University of New York and a PhD in Political Economy from Johns Hopkins University.


Michael Stalker, MPH
Behavior Change Communications Advisor

Mr. Michael Stalker has more than fifteen years experience in the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of sexual and reproductive health programs focusing on reducing the risk of sexually transmitted infections, including HIV. He has served both in technical and management capacities, and has experience with federally funded programs. Throughout his career he has worked to involve public and private sector service providers in a coordinated response, leveraging management, programmatic and political interests to a common goal. He has managed large-scale, multi-country programs, serving as Chief of Party for the Central American AIDS Action Program, providing technical, management, and staff leadership. Mr. Stalker has also provided technical assistance in Behavior Change Communication to national programs throughout Latin America, the Caribbean, and East and South Africa. He has a BA in Spanish from Furman University. Mr. Stalker has a Masters of Public Health Leadership from the University of North Carolina.



Leah Levin Ekbladh, MHS
Quality Assurance Advisor

Ms. Leah Levin Ekbladh has over 11 years of international development/health expertise in strengthening service delivery institutions and health policy. Her experience includes managing multifaceted federally funded projects, strategic planning, staff supervision, and leadership. Currently, Ms. Levin Ekbladh is responsible for technical coordination of a bilateral health policy and reform projects in Georgia and Azerbaijan and global private sector reproductive health projects in the Philippines and Ukraine. Prior to joining Abt, Ms. Levin Ekbladh was a quality assurance specialist and regional technical coordinator for Eastern Europe and Eurasia at IntraHealth International. In the former role, Ms. Levin Ekbladh provided direct technical assistance in quality assurance to Ministries of Health, regional and country offices, and in-country counterparts. Ms. Levin Ekbladh managed the accreditation of a distance learning program for rural nurses in Armenia, updated national service delivery guidelines in RH/FP and Maternal Health and created dissemination systems to distribute guidelines to the health service delivery level. Ms. Levin Ekbladh has experience developing, implementing, monitoring, and evaluating clinical training programs for family planning, reproductive health and post-abortion care in Central Asian Republics and Turkey. In the latter role, Ms. Levin Ekbladh led the development of assistance strategies to improve reproductive health care services in Eastern Europe and Eurasia by developing and implementing annual project work plans and budgets in the region, working closely with host country counterparts and USAID Missions. She has extensive experience designing and implementing international reproductive health programs with a focus on service quality, and provider and system performance.

Suzanne Rainey
Director of Online Communications

Ms. Suzanne Rainey is a senior director at Forum One Communications, PSP-One's partner in online communication and collaboration. Suzanne manages the PSP-One web site and community outreach efforts, as well as the project's different work spaces designed for online task collaboration. At Forum One she is in charge of several large web projects in the areas of health, HIV/AIDS, and international development. She works closely with clients to create communication tools, especially in the realm of professional networks and communities of practice. In conjunction with Abt Associates she manages the International AIDS Economics Network (www.IAEN.org), a partnership of several multi-laterals and other donors interested in sharing economic and policy expertise and resources to mitigate the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the developing world. Suzanne has worked in the field of international development for 13 years, including two years in Poland with the US Peace Corps, and five years with Arthur Andersen and KPMG Peat Marwick as project implementer on USAID-funded international fiscal development projects. She has professional experience in Poland, Slovenia, the Philippines, Armenia and Georgia, and speaks Polish and basic French.


Denise Averbug, MPH
Senior Analyst

Ms. Denise Averbug joined the project in November 2004 and is currently Country Manager for Guatemala, Peru and Ghana. Throughout the life of the project Ms. Averbug has designed, led and managed a variety of activities in areas such as social marketing, partnerships, base of the pyramid (BOP), long acting and permanent methods and HIV/AIDS. She participated in the development of a quality improvement tool for private midwives, a private sector legal and regulatory guide, a primer on health financing and one on training private providers. She leads the no-scalpel vasectomy activity in Honduras, the BOP activity in Ghana, and manages the Guatemala and Peru country programs. Ms. Averbug also provides technical support to the BOP activity in India and to the Honduras country program. Ms. Averbug received her MPH in international health from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and is fluent in Portuguese and Spanish.

Gael O’Sullivan, MBA
Senior Advisor, Social Marketing and Behavior Change Communication

Ms. Gael O’Sullivan provides expertise to the PSP-One Project in the areas of social marketing and behavior change communication. She is currently designing a youth-friendly pharmacy network initiative and is researching and writing a paper on the sustainability of social marketing programs. Ms. O’Sullivan has worked for over 20 years in the fields of social marketing and health promotion, both domestically and internationally. As part of the USAID-funded SOMARC project in the 1980s and 1990s, Ms. O’Sullivan designed and managed model social marketing programs in Morocco and the Eastern Caribbean that included strong private sector pharmaceutical partnership components. Throughout her career, Ms. O’Sullivan has applied her research, marketing, communication and strategic planning skills to programs that promote healthy behaviors in the United States and over 25 countries in Africa, Asia, the Near East and the Caribbean. Ms. O’Sullivan’s areas of expertise include family planning, reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, nutrition and tobacco control. She is the lead author of “A Field Guide to Designing a Health Communication Strategy” and an expert in applying private sector marketing techniques to meet consumer demand and achieve social goals. Ms. O’Sullivan speaks fluent French.

Anand Sinha
Director of PSP-One India

Mr. Anand Sinha has over 11 years of experience in market research, rural development, health communication and social marketing. Prior to PSP-One he oversaw research and strategic planning on the CMS project and SOMARC projects in India. Mr. Sinha oversaw studies for design and evaluation of a number of private sector category promotion campaigns and rural marketing of reproductive health and child survival, and for setting up private provider networks. He has experience in working with, and developing partnerships with the corporate and private sector for public health programs, and in marketing strategy design and assessment. His current areas of interest lie in rural marketing using new technologies and media, and examining the differences between private and public sector cultures, priorities and ways of working in the area of health promotion.


Dr. Kathryn Banke
Senior Associate

Dr. Kathryn Banke is an epidemiologist with nine years of experience working in surveillance, infectious diseases, and research design and implementation in developing countries. She contributes technical assistance in the design and implementation of PSP-One research and monitoring and evaluation activities. Prior to joining Abt Associates, Dr. Banke worked in the Global Immunization Division at the Centers for Disease Control. She has worked in numerous countries including Tanzania, Azerbaijan, Yemen, India, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Zambia, DR Congo, Ghana, and Latin America and the Caribbean. Dr. Banke holds a B.A. in human biology from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in epidemiology from Emory University, and speaks French and Spanish.

Dr. Mursaleena Islam
Senior Associate/Economist

Dr. Mursaleena Islam is an economist with more than nine years of experience conducting research and managing implementation in a wide variety of projects. Dr. Islam specializes in health financing and economics, health policy, financial planning, costing, and health systems. She is responsible for technical coordination and research on health financing activities for PSP-One, where she collaborates with external donors and partners. Dr. Islam helped organize and provide technical leadership at a workshop in India on health vouchers, working closely with partners, KfW, Packard Foundation, and USAID/India. She is currently working on an evaluation of a pilot program extending health insurance to informal sector workers in Nicaragua. Dr. Islam also works on the USAID-funded Health Systems 20/20 project where she recently facilitated a stakeholder workshop on performance-based financing in Tanzania, funded by Norad. As the principal editor of the Health Systems Assessment Approach: A How-To Manual, Mursaleena Islam coordinated and oversaw the development of the manual. Her other work has included: studying health-seeking behavior of urban poor in India and Philippines and understanding the economic impact of avian influenza. In the past, she has worked on evaluation of water management policies in Bangladesh and managed projects on economic valuation and litigation in the US corporate sector. Dr. Islam received her bachelor’s degree in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, her master’s degree in economics from Syracuse University, and her PhD in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.


Marc Luoma
Senior Associate

Mr. Marc Luoma has over 22 years of experience managing, designing, implementing, and evaluating organizational development, performance improvement, and human resources projects in international development, manufacturing, industrial, and government environments. He has extensive experience in Human Resources for Health interventions including retention, motivation, and productivity. Prior to joining the PSP-One project he served as the Deputy Director for a global project office in Ethiopia, and before that as the Performance Improvement Director for three USAID-funded global projects (PRIME, PRIME II, and the Capacity Project). Mr. Luoma has extensive private-sector experience and served as the Director of Associate Development and Performance for Honda of America Manufacturing, Inc. He received his BA in Organizational Behavior Management from Western Michigan University.

Pam Riley
Private Sector Specialist

Pam Riley joined the PSP-One project in February 2009 as a Private Sector Specialist, with an emphasis on developing sustainable technology partnerships and applications. Ms. Riley’ background includes fourteen years with mobile phone operator Vodafone (and its predecessor companies), most recently as VP Federal Regulatory. Responsibilities at Vodafone included managing international policy strategy for Vodafone’s European joint ventures from their Brussels office, and facilitating multinational licenses for the Globalstar mobile satellite system. She also spent three years developing nonprofit alliances for The HealthCentral Network, a large consumer health social networking site, and advised on private-public marketing partnerships for Dillon Allman & Partners. Ms. Riley holds a law degree and a Masters in Family Studies, and is a licensed family therapy clinician.


Ilana Ron
Senior Analyst

Ms. Ilana Ron is a Senior Analyst at Abt Associates Inc. with over four years of professional experience in research and evaluation of youth development, education and public health programs, both domestically and internationally. Ms. Ron recently joined Abt Associates and was a Research Associates at Branch Associates, Inc. for four years where she specialized in the application of rigorous qualitative research methods; descriptive statistics; and process and impact evaluations. Ms. Ron has significant consulting experience in South Africa examining employee views on institutional culture at the University of the Witwatersrand; evaluating the impact of a youth development program in Johannesburg for the Living Together Project; examining the policy implications of large number of orphans and vulnerable children as a result of HIV/AIDS; and authoring numerous research pieces on policy issues associated with the growth of global cities for the Urban Age project, a global investigation on cities by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank. Ms. Ron received a B.A. in Political Science and Middle East Studies from McGill University; a M.Sc. in Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics; and is working on a PhD in International Political Economy from the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa.

Rebecca Patsika
Private Sector Specialist

Mrs. Rebecca Patsika is an Associate/Private Sector Specialist with 7 years experience working in domestic and international public health and development, social marketing, behavior change communication and education with a strong background working with populations affected by HIV/AIDS. She has excellent writing, qualitative and quantitative research and analytic skills as well as a strong foundation in the logistics of project management and coordination. Mrs. Patsika has extensive experience working to build the capacity of community based and non-governmental organizations. Prior to Abt Associates Inc., Mrs. Patsika was a Communication Specialist at American Institutes for Research where she worked to develop and implement strategic campaign plans for effective marketing communication. Mrs. Patsika graduated from Georgetown University College of Arts and Sciences with a B.A. in English and from Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine with a Masters in International Public Health and Development. She has lived and worked in Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mexico and Sri Lanka.


Dr. Aneesa Arur
Associate

Dr. Aneesa Arur is a health systems specialist with five years of experience with conducting and managing research. Aneesa works in the international health area with expertise in monitoring and evaluation, public-private partnerships, performance-linked payments and contracting. She focused on the relative effectiveness of different approaches to contracting for health services in Afghanistan in her recent PhD research. Aneesa Arur currently provides monitoring & evaluation and other technical support to the Private Sector Partnership (PSP-One) India projects. As a monitoring & evaluation specialist at Johns Hopkins University, Aneesa provided third-party evaluation and capacity building support to the Ministry of Public Health in Afghanistan. She has previously been a consultant to the World Bank and the World Health Organization on strategies to improve health service delivery in developing countries. Aneesa has also set up and managed intervention-research in maternal and early childhood health with ICICI Bank in India.


Karen Finnegan, MPH
Senior Analyst

Karen Finnegan joined the PSP-One project in June 2008 and is responsible for monitoring and evaluation activities in Latin American and the Caribbean. She is currently working on the design and implementation of a population-based survey in Central America. In addition to work focused on the Latin American region, Karen will also provide support for general monitoring and evaluation needs for the PSP-One project. Karen has a background in community health and received her MPH in Epidemiology from Emory University


Sarah Ritterhoff
Associate Analyst

Ms. Sarah Ritterhoff is the country administrator for Ethiopia and Nigeria field activities under the Private Sector Partnerships-One project. She provides technical and administrative support to the Network for Africa and she also serves as Secretariat for the Private Sector Working Group, whose objective is to promote private-sector participation in public health programs. Her primary interests are commercial alliances and business capacity development. Ms. Ritterhoff has worked in Nigeria and Ethiopia and has a BA in Business Administration from Eckerd College.


Angela Stene
Associate

Ms. Angela Stene joined Abt Associates, Inc. in January 2008. She has 10 years of domestic and international legal advocacy and health policy experience. Angela has lived and worked in Kosovo, Rwanda and Ethiopia's Somali region on long-term post-conflict development issues. In Kosovo, she identified legal advocacy/information needs of repatriated minority groups. In Rwanda, she established a prison response initiative that sought to mitigate high risk behaviors among prisoners. In Ethiopia, she fostered livelihood and income generation opportunities for the caregivers of severely malnourished children. Angela also has health marketing and public-private partnership experiences, working on hospital infection control in Kenya, global pandemic influenza response, and with California corporations and NGOs through a fellowship with the Schwarzenegger Administration. Angela holds a Masters degree in Health Policy and International Development from Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School. She has a BA in psychology and political science from Minnesota's Gustavus Adolphus College.

Lena Kolyada
Country Manager

Ms. Lena Kolyada is an international development specialist with 9 years of experience in technical areas including social marketing and behavior change communications programming, public relations, and social marketing research. Managerial experience consists of financial and administrative management of donor-funded programs; project design and activity planning; budget preparation and management; library and resource center management; organization of workshops, conferences, and study-tours.
Her current PSP-One assignments include management of a social marketing project on Addressing Reproductive Health Needs of Young Married Couples in India; coordination of family planning activities in Russia and E&E region and technical contribution to the assessment reports of private sector and family planning under these activities. Ms. Kolyada’s regional experience comprises work in India, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Georgia. She holds a Master’s degree in computer science and is expected to receive a Master’s degree in Management from Durham University UK this year. She is fluent in Russian and English.

Ashleigh Hodge
Communications Associate Analyst

Ms. Ashleigh Hodge joined the PSP-One project in November 2007 as Communications Analyst, she provides technical and administrative support on all communications activities, including PSP-One publication management and oversite of daily PSP-One website communication activities. Ms. Hodge graduated from Hampton University with a BA in Print Journalism and English.