MEET THE STAFF

Project HEALTH is supported by a combination of full-time staff and volunteer leaders. Our full-time staff is comprised of six Site Directors, two Youth Programs Managers, an Executive Assistant/Development Associate, a Chief Operating Officer, and an Executive Director. Then, on each campus there are undergraduate volunteer campus coordinators who provide leadership overarching programmatic support. In addition, each program has a set of volunteer leaders who are responsible for the daily implementation of their programs.

Rebecca Onie, Executive Director

Rebecca co-founded Project HEALTH with Dr. Barry Zuckerman during her second year at Harvard College. After graduation, she served as Executive Director of Project HEALTH for three years, overseeing Project HEALTH's growth to Providence and Harlem. In October 1999, Rebecca received the Do Something Brick Award for Community Leadership. From 600 applicants across the country, Rebecca was selected as one of ten "dynamic young people under the age of thirty, with the passion and drive to improve their communities by developing innovative strategies to create sustainable, positive change." Rebecca attended Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review and a research assistant for Professors Laurence Tribe and Lani Guinier. Upon graduating, she served as a law clerk for the Honorable Diane P. Wood of United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and an associate at Miner, Barnhill & Galland, P.C., a boutique civil rights law firm in Chicago, Illinois, where she represented community health centers, affordable housing developers, nonprofit organizations, and plaintiffs in employment discrimination and civil rights cases. Rebecca has served on Project HEALTH's board since June 2002, and in February 2006, she returned to the organization as Executive Director.

Nell Perlmutter, Chief Operating Officer

In April of 2007, Nell Perlmutter joined Project HEALTH as the Chief Operating Officer. Nell's professional experience and interests include educational program development and management, leadership development, strategic planning and advising for growing organizations, and the development of successful public-private partnerships.

Recently, Nell has served as the Director of Engagement Programs for the Harvard Initiative for Global Health. In this role, Nell was responsible for building and maintaining strategic internal and external partnerships and programs to support the mission of this multi-disciplinary initative.

Prior to this experience, Nell served as a Research Associate at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government where she designed and wrote a set of partnership guidelines from a series entitled "HIV/AIDS in Africa and Asia: Building Sustainable Partnerships," which were presented at the 2004 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Most recently, Nell has returned to Citizen Schools, where she had previously worked for two years as a Campus Director, for an interim post as Director of the National Apprenticeship Department.

Nell holds an Adjunct Faculty position at Lesley University and teaches a course in curriculum development for out-of-school-time eduction. She has a Masters of Education in Administration, Training and Policy Studies from Boston University and BA in Modern Language and Literature from Ohio University. Out of the office, she is an avid photographer and a fledgling triathlete. Nell lives in Cambridge, MA.

Sarah McGinty, Director of Special Projects

Sarah McGinty joins Project HEALTH from the University Development Office at Harvard University. As Assistant Director of Development, Sarah spent two years developing fundraising strategies and programming for University-wide initiatives on global health, public education reform, inter-disciplinary science, and financial aid. In addition, she managed the President and Provost's development activities and staffed several alumni committees. Previously, Sarah conducted research for HBO and worked for Creative Artists Agency where she gained exposure to talent management, film development and production, and creative product management. While completing her degree in History and Literature at Harvard College, Sarah served as an instructor for Tenacity, a youth development organization that provides Boston youth with free tennis instruction and academic enrichment.

Emily Brice, Chicago Site Director

Emily Brice founded Project HEALTH's Chicago site in 2006. She graduated from the University of Chicago, where she studied Political Science and was active in the Human Rights program. As an undergraduate, Emily founded and led Students for Human Rights, an organization dedicated to raising awareness about local human rights violations, including working with labor unions to promote accountability in services offered to minority and low-income populations at Chicago's non-profit hospitals. Emily gained a broader understanding of advocacy and policy issues through a Metcalf Fellowship at the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. Most recently, she assisted in the development of anti-xenophobia and public awareness programs for the Southern African Migration Project and Africa Unite, migration and refugee-rights organizations in Cape Town, South Africa.

LaToya White, Washington, D.C. Site Director

LaToya joins Project HEALTH with a public health background in HIV, community and minority health, social justice, and health disparities. While earning her Masters in Public Health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, LaToya focused her work on the sexual health of African American college students, researching the social and environmental factors that contribute to attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors concerning sex. She also chaired UNC's annual Minority Health Conference in 2007, "AIDS at 25: It's Time to Deliver". The conference brought together top researchers, community leaders, and advocates to discuss the effects of HIV/AIDS among minority communities in the United States. Prior to joining Project HEALTH, LaToya worked with Healthy Carolinians, an office of the North Carolina Department of Health that works to reduce health disparities by supporting community partnerships that address issues such as access to good care, chronic illness, and child healthcare. In addition, LaToya served as a National AIDS Fund AmeriCorps member. During her service, she organized community HIV testing and political advocacy efforts for HIV awareness and comprehensive sex education and managed a teen peer educator group focused on HIV prevention.

Sutton Kiplinger, New York Site Director

Sutton Kiplinger holds a B.A. in Urban Studies from Columbia University, where her research and fieldwork focused primarily on models for affordable and low-income housing. While at Columbia, Sutton served as a volunteer and then a program coordinator for Project HEALTH's Asthma Swimming Program, and she also interned with the West Side SRO Law Project in New York City and with the Children's Law Center in her native Washington, DC.

Julia Martin, New York Youth Programs Manager

Julia Martin comes to Project HEALTH with a Master's in Public Health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she focused her studies on community-based participatory research methods. During her time in Chapel Hill she developed a comprehensive sex education for the Love of Learning Program, an educational program designed to increase self-efficacy for college-bound African American high school students. After graduating, she moved to rural Ontario where she lived and worked in Camphill Communities Ontario, an intentional community for adults with special needs. While there she developed a self-advocacy workshop and facilitated a photovoice project, in which participants took photographs and used them to initiate change in their community. Before joining Project HEALTH, Julia worked at National Advocates for Pregnant Women to raise awareness about reproductive justice and drug-policy reform at both the grassroots and national levels. Working with community-based organizations to promote positive change is at the heart of Julia's vocation. As Harlem Youth Programs Manager Julia is particularly excited about the intersection of student activism and community-based change that Project HEALTH contributes to the Public Health movement.

Philethea Duckett, New York Advocacy Program Manager

Philethea recently joined Project HEALTH as the New York Advocacy Programs Manager after receiving her B.A. in Psychology from New York University. Focusing on the disciplines of both social and industrial/organizational psychology, she examined the behaviors of individuals in various contexts through her coursework. Philethea was a founding member of Project HEALTH's NYU site, serving as a volunteer and a program coordinator for the Family Help Desk at Bellevue Hospital. She is currently completing her Masters in Public Administration, specializing in Health Policy, at the Wagner School of Public Service at NYU.

Rajan Sonik, Sickle Cell Advocacy Fellow

Rajan Sonik joined Project HEALTH in July 2007 after graduating from Harvard College. As an undergraduate, Rajan volunteered with multiple Project HEALTH programs and held numerous leadership positions in the organization. His primary efforts surrounded the STRIVE program, through which he mentored several youth with sickle cell disease (SCD) and led a number of advocacy projects. Rajan also conducted research related to SCD, ranging from examining its sociopolitical history to performing laboratory research on its biochemistry. Upon graduation, Rajan received the prestigious Harvard College Ames Award for his outstanding service work. Rajan's work with Project HEALTH is supported by the Elliot and Anne Richardson Fellowship in Public Service and the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Public Service Fellowship.

Sonia Rodrigues, Providence Site Director

Sonia joins Project HEALTH after working at Rhode Island Kids Count for almost five years. At Rhode Island Kids Count, a children's policy and advocacy organization, Sonia coordinated health insurance outreach and enrollment strategies in Pawtucket, RI as part of the Covering Kids & Families project. Most recently she became the Project Director of Covering Kids & Families and was responsible for the statewide coordination of the program. Previous to working at Kids Count, Sonia worked at the Urban League of Rhode Island, recruiting and training prospective adoptive and foster parents and at Geiger-Gibson Community Health Center in Dorchester, Massachusetts as a community organizer. Sonia holds BAs in Internal Relations and Portuguese and Brazilian Studies from Brown University. Sonia is native of Portugal of Capeverdean descent and has lived in the United States since 1991. She currently lives in Central Falls, Rhode Island with her two children.

Mark Marino, Baltimore Site Director

After graduating from Miami University (OH) with a B.A. in Zoology and a Neuroscience minor, Mark worked in the clinical laboratory setting in Minnesota performing enzyme immunoassays for detection HIV type-1 antibodies. He developed an interest in the effect of disease more than the underlying genetics of the disease, leading him to pursue broader public health issues and their effect on underserved populations as a Peace Corps community health volunteer in Burkina Faso. His projects included HIV/AIDS and malaria trainings and outreach activities, nutrition, hygiene, and sexual education sessions with students, vaccination campaigns and pre-natal consultations at the local clinic, an income generating chicken project with women’s group, organic sesame project with agriculture group, coordination of national girls empowerment and education camps, and coordination of national HIV/AIDS educational outreach program called Bike-a-thon.

Monica Biswas, Boston Site Director

Monica Biswas has focused her career on providing opportunities for young people to be healthy, and to thrive in their schools and communities. She received her Master of Science degree in public health from Harvard School of Public Health, focusing on the link between education and access to opportunities to the health of young people. Monica's work at City Year in South Carolina involved writing and implementing a substance abuse prevention curriculum for middle school students as well as facilitating leadership development opportunities for volunteers between the ages of 17 and 24. At the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, she supported School-Based Health Centers and led research on correlating behaviors of suicide risk among students presenting at the clinics. Immediately prior to joining Project HEALTH, Monica worked at the Education Development Center where she developed a teacher training initiative in the Democratic Republic of Congo to better connect schools to local resources, such as nurses, health workers, doctors, and other community members/institutions.

Beth Adler, Boston Youth Programs Manager

Beth Adler is a recent graduate of Brown University where she was a Development Studies concentrator and involved with Students for AIDS Awareness and Brown University Students for Health Education. With public health as a focus of her studies at Brown, Beth spent two summers doing community health work and research in Cape Town, South Africa for HealthWise South Africa and the University of the Western Cape HIV & AIDS Programme. Her research culminated in an honors thesis investigating youth self-efficacy and leisure engagement in a resource-poor community outside Cape Town, where young people faced many of the same challenges of poverty and poor health as those served by Project HEALTH. Beth was a Vice President of Brown Hillel and has experience with and a strong commitment to undergraduate mentoring and empowerment, which she also brings to the Project HEALTH Boston Youth Programs Manager position.