Milani Kyaw Awarded an NIH Minority Health/Global Health Disparities Research Fellowship

by Milani Kyaw was mentored by Dr. Purnima Madhivanan, Public Health Research Institute in Mysore, India and Dr. Art Reingold, UC Berkeley | October 4, 2016

Contributed by Dr. Rainbow A. Rubin, Advisor, Allied Health Science

This year, senior Milani Kyaw, received The Minority Health/Global Health Disparities Research Fellowship. Milani will graduate this year with a major in Allied Health Science and a minor in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her academic interests led her to apply for this international summer research program that provides training in infectious disease research, with a focus on diseases that disproportionately affect people in developing countries.

The Global Health Disparities fellowship is funded through the Minority Health & Health Disparities International Research Training (MHIRT) initiative at the National Institutes of Health. It aims to increase diversity in biomedical and behavioral science research and support research training for students who will contribute to the elimination of health disparities that exist among disadvantaged populations in the U.S. and in developing countries. For this project, Milani was mentored by Dr. Purnima Madhivanan at the Public Health Research Institute in Mysore, India and Dr. Art Reingold at UC Berkeley

The MHIRT Program leverages infectious disease expertise across a range of disciplines, including integrative biology, molecular and cell biology, bioengineering, computational biology, computer science, biophysics, environmental biology, epidemiology, and economics. The focus of participating faculty members is emerging and neglected infectious diseases, defined broadly to include HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria (including emerging drug-resistant strains, which disproportionately impact low-income communities); emerging epidemics like avian influenza and SARS; as well as so-called “neglected” diseases, like dengue virus, schistosomiasis, and HCV. Infectious disease challenges do not recognize geographic boundaries, and thus form an important bridge between the wealthy world and the developing world.

The goals of the MHIRT program are to:

To empower underrepresented health sciences students, by providing opportunities to bring their knowledge and research training to under-served communities in the developed and developing world.
To promote the translation of knowledge from the global South to the North, by encouraging students to identify ways in which their experiences abroad can inform health and research practices in the U.S.
To build capacity at U.C. Berkeley and our developing country partner sites, by providing new resources, increased student and faculty exchange, and new collaborative research projects.
To address the growing student interest in global health across the campus, and to provide international research experiences with a focus on health in developing countries. The UC Berkeley MHIRT program is administered by the Biology Scholars Program and the Center for Emerging and Neglected Diseases.

In Mysore, India, Milani participated in a project on Antenatal and Postnatal Maternal Health. There are 2.1 million people living with HIV in India and among these, almost 900,000 are women in reproductive age group. Most women in the rural areas of India such as the villages and haadis (tribal villages) in Mysore have limited access to affordable healthcare. Women are burdened with domestic and community responsibilities that restrict them from leaving their homes. Even when they have found a rare opportunity to do so with the help of their neighbors, the closet health center is a day’s travel away making it impossible for the woman to seek the healthcare they need.

The Public Health Research Institute of India’s (PHRII) Saving Children Improving Lives (SCIL) project uses community engagement as a tool in order to integrate HIV testing in pregnant women and prevent Parent to Child Transmission of HIV. Along with the staff members, Milani assisted the communities in need with mobile clinics to provide education workshops to all the village residents and STI testing’s, monthly antenatal care until the end of the pregnancy, monthly counseling, and 4 sessions of postnatal care after the delivery of the baby for the pregnant women. SCIL is an ongoing project since 2007 and this project specifically aimed to identify factors such as the mother’s age and education level that contributes to miscarriages, pre-mature deliveries, and infant deaths in rural Mysore. Causes of infant deaths were also identified and calculated to determine and implement future solutions in order to decrease the high infant mortality rate of rural India. By identifying these factors, we aim to implement better antenatal and postnatal care not only in the SCIL project but also to educate the communities and raise awareness of these factors to other health organizations.

Students who are interested in learning more about this opportunity can apply here.