2022 Queenan Global Health Awards
Pictured above (left to right): Drs. Yaneve Fonge, Lilly Liu, Anju Ranjit, and Seema Chopra have been selected as the recipients of the 2022 Queenan Global Health Awards.
Yaneve Fonge, MD, a second-year maternal-fetal medicine fellow at the University of Pittsburgh, is a recipient of the International Agency Mentored Research Fellowship (Geneva-based agency). This mentored fellowship will support her interest in international maternal and perinatal health research and guideline development.
Dr. Fonge is particularly interested in conducting research that supports the development of policies that promote equitable improvements in maternal outcomes for underserved populations. She believes examining and addressing social determinants of health is critical to improving health outcomes for pregnant people. This opportunity will help Dr. Fonge combat preventable maternal mortality outcomes due to inequitable social structures worldwide.
Lilly Liu, MD, MPH, a second-year maternal-fetal medicine fellow at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center – New York Presbyterian, is a recipient of the Visiting Teaching Fellowship and will spend two months as a visiting faculty member at the Princess Marina Hospital in Gaborone, Botswana in 2023.
Dr. Liu will interact with their staff and physicians through lectures and presentations on high-risk obstetrics. Her core curriculum will focus on expanding the obstetrical ultrasound training and critical obstetric care implemented through a Queenan Global Health Fellow in 2022. This opportunity will promote Dr. Liu’s passion, values, and beliefs to seek solutions locally and abroad for low-resourced, marginalized obstetric populations.
Anju Ranjit, MD, MPH, a second-year maternal-fetal medicine fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, is the recipient of the Seed Funding for Investigator-Initiated Research Projects for her research project “Fetal vascular dynamics in placental malaria in Uganda.”
Under the mentorship of Dr. Stephanie Gaw at the University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Ranjit will conduct research to characterize the fetal vascular response to placental malaria. This funding will enable Dr. Ranjit to expand her skills as a clinical researcher while contributing much-needed knowledge of mechanisms that cause malaria-related adverse outcomes, including fetal growth restriction (FGR), low birth weight, preterm birth, and fetal loss in pregnant individuals.
Seema Chopra, MBBS, MD, is the 2022 Queenan Travel Award recipient. Dr. Chopra is a consultant (Prof.) OB/GYN at the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER), a tertiary care institute in Chandigarh, India. Dr. Chopra has many years of clinical and teaching experience at PGIMER. She actively cares for pregnant women with associated medical, surgical, and cardiac co-morbidities in a special antenatal clinic with a multidisciplinary team and consultation from related departments.
The Foundation for SMFM will host Dr. Chopra at the 2023 SMFM Annual Meeting in San Francisco, California. Her group’s poster, “Maternal hyponatremia as a surrogate marker of severity of preeclampsia and its association with fetomaternal outcome,” will be presented at Poster Session I on Thursday, February 9, 2023.
Learn more about the Queenan Fellowships for Global Health here.
