FRED H. BIXBY
FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM
2007 Fellows

After a successful application process, the Fred H. Bixby Fellowship committee met 8–9 March 2007 to select fellows for the 2007 year. Four outstanding applicants were chosen out of 12 highly qualified finalists. The selected fellows epitomize the goals and objectives of the Fred H. Bixby Fellowship Program—to offer training opportunities to citizens of developing countries in order to strengthen and build capacity in their home countries. The profiles of the fellows that follow well represent the range of research activities at the Population Council, with fellows working in a variety of Council offices and programs.

Asmaa Elbadawy will complete her Ph.D. in economics from McMaster University in Canada this fall. Her research interests lie in the economics of education and the economics of gender, marriage, and the family, with a focus on the Middle East region, and more specifically Egypt, her native country. She will work with Ragui Assaad in the Council’s Cairo office. Asmaa was a visiting student intern at the Council’s Egypt office in 2006 and will continue her partnership with Ragui Assaad in the coming year under the Council's Poverty, Gender, and Youth program.

Subramaniam Chandrasekhar (Chandra) completed his Ph.D. in economics from The Pennsylvania State University in 2004 and is a citizen of India. Currently he is assistant professor at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research in Mumbai, India. Chandra will work with Mark Montgomery at the Population Council’s headquarters in New York under the Poverty, Gender, and Youth program. His current research focuses on trends in poverty among Indian children and adolescents, and his fellowship at the Council will focus on the multidimensional aspects of urban poverty.

Francis Onyango will finish his Ph.D. in demography at the University of Pennsylvania in the spring of 2007. Francis previously was a research trainee at the African Population and Health Research Center in Nairobi, Kenya, where he worked on a number of research projects, including the Adolescent Safe Motherhood Study in South Nyanza, the Nairobi Urban Health Equity Gauge, and the Nairobi Urban Demographic Surveillance System. He will be returning to his home country to work in the Council’s Nairobi office, where he will be mentored by Jill Keesbury and Harriet Birungi. Francis’s research interests include health and morbidity in sub-Saharan Africa with specific focus on inequalities in access to maternal and child health care services, adolescent sexual and reproductive health, and HIV and AIDS including the response to and the role of voluntary HIV/AIDS counseling and testing. He will work with Jill Keesbury on the Kenyan study on emergency contraception as a bridge to voluntary counseling and testing services and with Harriet Birungi on the Council’s family planning studies in Uganda. He will be situated within the Council's Reproductive Health program.

Yunhui Zhang is a citizen of China. She obtained her Ph.D. in 2004. She has a background in public health, and her research interests focus on environmental health science in China. Currently she is an associate professor at the School of Public Health at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. Yunhui’s proposed research is based on evaluating the male reproductive toxicology of diethylhexyl phthalate (DEHP), which is commonly found in cosmetics and used in flexible plastics. She will collaborate with Matthew Hardy at the Council's Center for Biomedical Research, conducting both animal and human-based studies to estimate the antiandrogenic effects of DEHP during sexual maturation. This work will be situated within the Reproductive Health program.

---