Yihenew Tesfaye Email and Phone Number

I am an applied anthropologist, a public health professional, and an implementation scientist with a multidisciplinary training and a proven track record of interdisciplinary research, teaching, and work experiences in biocultural and medical anthropology, public health, water sanitation and hygiene (WASH), maternal and child health (MCH), water and food insecurity, and health disparity in sub-Saharan Africa and the US. My work focuses at the interfaces of poverty, health, and the environment through understanding the social, environmental, and behavioral determinants of health; the socio-ecological determinants and bio-social outcomes of water and food insecurity; the roles played by community health workers in health systems and health programs; the health and social ramifications of conflicts (religion and ethnic conflicts); the social and health-system barriers and facilitators to MCH projects and interventions.I also work on program design, monitoring, evaluation, learning, and adapting for the development, heath, and the WASH sectors. For more than a decade, I have been a part of interdisciplinary teams in diverse development and health projects and programs in sub-Saharan Africa and the US. I have also been a part of interdisciplinary teams (including the Household Water Insecurity Experience-Research Coordination Network [HWISE-RCN]) developing and validating experience-based measures of household water and food insecurity scales and assessing links between psychological distress and insecurity, with a focus on designing both culturally-specific and universal measurement scales and assessing links between psychological distress and insecurity.