Our Advisory Board
The REACH Advisory Board is a network of nine expert individuals who are committed to the cause of delivering health-care to developing countries. The Advisory Board demonstrates this dedication by providing advice on standards of care and efficacy of projects to the Executive Board, Project Directors and the general membership. They help ensure sustainability in all the undertakings of the organization. They shape REACH policy-making and mediate interactions with other organizations.
Andrew A. Arkutu, MB. Ch.B, FRCIOG, FWACS.
Dr. Andrew A. Arkutu worked for Pathfinder International from 2001 through August 2006 and joined the Pathfinder Board of Directors in November 2006. He was Pathfinder’s country representative in Ghana for five years and its medical director for Africa for three years. Before joining Pathfinder, Dr. Arkutu held numerous positions forthe United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in Zimbabwe, Tanzania, and Nigeria. His last position with UNFPA was director of their Country Support Team for Southern Africa. Between his service with UNFPA and Pathfinder International, Dr. Arkutu served as special representative of the executive director of UNFPA in Eritrea and Sierra Leone.
His special skills and areas of interest are sexual and reproductive health/rights and family planning, including adolescent reproductive health and HIV/AIDS, with a focus on policy formulation, review, and analysis; program design, development, and management support; training of service providers and management personnel; and program evaluation. Dr. Arkutu has been chair of the Board of Directors of the Centre for African Family Studies, a leading African and international nongovernmental organization in the area of sexual and reproductive health and rights. He has been the invited guest speaker, or delivered the keynote address, at many international conferences and is the author of many books, case reports, and clinical studies. Before joining UNFPA, Dr. Arkutu taught Obstetrics and Gynecology at medical schools in Ghana, Tanzania and Zimbabwe and also worked for the World Health Organization (WHO) from 1976 to 1980.
Paul Farmer MD, Ph.D.
Medical anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer is the Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Social Medicine in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where he is also the Chair, and a founding director of Partners In Health, an international non-profit organization that provides direct health care services and undertakes research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty. Dr. Farmer’s work draws primarily on active clinical practice and focuses on community-based treatment strategies for infectious diseases in resource-poor settings, health and human rights, and the role ofsocial inequalities in determining disease distribution and outcomes. He is Chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) in Boston, and served for ten years as medical director of a charity hospital, L’Hopital Bon Sauveur, in rural Haiti. Along with his colleagues at BWH, in the Program in Infectious Disease and Social Change at HMS, and in Haiti, Peru, Russia, Rwanda, Lesotho, and Malawi, Dr. Farmer has pioneered novel, community-based treatment strategies for AIDS and tuberculosis. Dr. Farmer and his colleagues have successfully challenged the policymakers and critics who claim that quality health care is impossible to deliver in resource-poor settings.
Dr. Farmer has written extensively about health and human rights, and about the role of social inequalities in the distribution and outcome of infectious diseases. He is the author of Pathologies of Power, Infections and Inequalities, The Uses of Haiti, and AIDS and Accusation. Inaddition, he is co-editor of Women, Poverty, and AIDS and of The Global Impact of Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis. He is the recipient of the Carter Award for Humanitarian Contributions to the Health of Humankind from the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, the Salk Institute Medal for Health and Humanity, the Duke University Humanitarian Award, the Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association, the American Medical Association’s Outstanding International Physician (Nathan Davis) Award, the Heinz Award for the Human Condition, and the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship. In 1993, he was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award in recognition of his work. Dr. Farmer is the subject of Pulitzer Prizewinner Tracy Kidder’s ‘Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World’ (Random House, 2003).
Joyce Sackey, MD
Joyce A. Sackey, M.D. is Dean for Multicultural Affairs and Global Health and Associate Professor of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. Prior to joining Tufts, Dr. Sackey was on the medical staff at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where she served for many years as a primare care physician. She was also on the faculty at Harvard Medical School and served as Associate Master for the Oliver Wendell Holmes Society.
Dr. Sackey is a graduate of Dartmouth College and received her M.D. degree from Dartmouth Medical School. She completed her internship and residency in internal medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She was a Senior Rabkin fellow in the Shapiro Institute for Education and Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School where she completed advanced fellowship training in medical education.
Dr. Sackey has served for many years as a leader in medical education and has won numerous awards for her contribution to both undergraduate and graduate medical education. She has served on key committees at Harvard Medical School, including the Culturally Competent Care Education Committee and is currently a member of the Curriculum Committee at TUSM. As Dean for Multicultural Affairs and Global Health at TUSM, she oversees the school’s key diversity initiatives, including under-represented minority (URM) faculty and student recruitment, retention and development. She oversees the medical school’s Office for Multicultural Affairs and its pipeline programs targeting URM students at the high school, college and post-graduate levels, programs whose overall goal is to increase the number of URM students entering the biomedical careers, and, ultimately, increase workforce diversity.
A leader in global health education, Dr. Sackey has mentored numerous students, residents and junior faculty on global health services delivery and research. She is co-founder of the Foundation for African Relief (FAR), a Massachusetts-based non-profit organization and directs the AIDS Collaborative Project and its Visiting Scholar’s Exchange Program. The program has made significant contributions to the fight against HIV/AIDS through the education and training African physicians in the forefront of providing clinical care to people living with HIV/AIDS. As director of the Visiting Scholar’s Exchange Program, she has promoted exchange of ideas and collaboration among health care professionals from diverse backgrounds and disciplines.
Elijah Paintsil MB.ChB. (M.D.), FAAP
Dr. Elijah Paintsil is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Pharmacology at Yale University School of Medicine. His clinical interest is pediatric infectious diseases with special interest in the management multidrug resistant HIV infection and prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV. His research focuses on the cellular pharmacology of nucleoside analogs used in the treatment of HIV infection in relation to treatment response, drug toxicity, and evolution of drug resistance.
He received his medical degree from the University of Ghana Medical School in 1992. He helped develop the “Village Concept” – students from various disciplines working together in underserved areas to improve health and socioeconomic status of the population – as the President of the International Federation of Medical Students’ Association (IFMSA). After medical school he practiced in Ghana for several years. He served as the District Director of Health Services in the North Tognu District in Ghana, and as the Medical Director of TB and STDs/HIV Service at Battor Catholic Hospital; during this period he served as a consultant to the Catholic Health Services in Ghana and helped reformed the focus of health service delivery by the Catholic Health Service.
In 2006, Dr. Paintsil and his colleagues established the Yale-Ghana Partnership in Global Infectious Diseases Research with the mission of accelerating progress in Infectious Diseases and Public Health research in Africa through collaborative partnerships that effectively build intrinsic research capacity, reverse “brain-drain” by strengthening academic infrastructures, and create viable career opportunities for African and American scientists. Through this collaboration, Dr. Paintsil has extended his research to Ghana studying the effect of malaria during pregnancy on mother-to-child-transmission of HIV; and surrogate biomarkers for monitoring HIV therapy and disease progression of Pediatric HIV in resource limited settings.
Ana Hitri, Ph.D.
Recognizing that many of the US secondary school students do not have the means to receive a basic science education that is compatible with the academic rigor of tomorrow’s science and technology careers, Dr. Hitri founded the Georgetown Academic Studio that is dedicated to the development of a solid basic science foundation at an early age. As a medical scientist, Dr. Hitri is aware of the academic demands that recent technological advances place on young individuals who are preparing for careers in technology, allied health sciences or medicine in the 21st century.
Dr. Hitri holds an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering, MS degree in biochemistry and Ph.D. degree in pharmacology, and has produced research and published many scientific articles for the Veterans Administration, Georgetown University, National Institutes of mental Health and Medical College of Georgia.
She received her undergraduate education in Zagreb, Croatia and her graduate education in Chicago, Illinois. Having been educated in both, Europe and the United States she has acquired an understanding of the roots of educational issues and educational differences between the two continents.
She is interested in REACH because she would like to bring the rapidly developing areas of biomedical and physical sciences to schools in Ghana and to prepare the young people in Ghana for the academic challenges of the 21st century.
Isabella Sagoe-Moses MB.ChB. (M.D.), M.Sc.
Dr Isabella Sagoe-Moses is the National Child Health Coordinator at the Ghana Health Service. She earned her medical degree at the University of Ghana Medical School, proceeded to work in the Department of Child Health at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Kumasi and went on to earn an MSc in Tropical Pediatrics from the University of Liverpool in England. She has previously served as a Senior Medical Officer at the Princess Marie Louise Hospital in Ghana
A proud alum of Wesley Girls High School, Dr Sagoe Moses has published several works on women’s and infant nutrition, and is an advocate for breastfeeding and other positive infant feeding practices. She has contributed towards the development of new WHO growth standards as the supervisor for breastfeeding counselors at the Ghana site for the Multi-centre Growth Reference Study, generating data for the new standards for monitoring child growth and development. Dr Sagoe-Moses is also an Editor for the Malaria Watch magazine and lectures part-time at the University of Ghana Medical School. She is currently serving on the following national committees:
Early Childhood Care and Development Steering Committee; Child Protection Committee; Planning committee for Child Health Promotion Weeks and Integrated Maternal and Child Health campaigns (Chairman); Breastfeeding Code Monitoring Committee; Interagency Coordinating Committee for Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI); Roll Back Malaria Coordinating Committee.
Lewis R. Roberts, M.B. Ch.B, Ph.D.
Lewis Roberts is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Gastroenterology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He attended the University of Ghana Medical School, where he obtained his medical degree and went on to pursue a Ph.D. in Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Iowa. His clinical specialities are endoscopy and liver cancer, and his research focuses on understanding the mechanisms by which liver cancers develop, grow and spread, with the goal of developing individualized therapy for these malignancies. He also works on developing and validating methods for early detection and diagnosis of primary liver, biliary and pancreatic cancers, which are important imterventions for reducing the morbidity and mortality associated with these ailments.
Dr. Roberts is the President of Africa Partners Medical, a group of American and African doctors, nurses and other health care professionals committed to improving medical care in Africa. APM does so by sponsoring educational conferences in Africa and establishing long-term partnerships with indigenous African health care personnel. The faculty of Africa Partners Medical includes physicians and nurses from Mayo Clinic, Scott and White Clinic, National Institutes of Health, Cleveland Clinic, and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, among others, who volunteer their time. ”In a country where 115 out of 1,000 children don’t live to the age of 5, with many of them dying around the time of birth, a class on resuscitation of newborns can make a significant difference.” Dr. Roberts looks forward to working with REACH on more of such rewarding endeavors in Ghana and in Africa at large.
Frederick K. Asinor, EdD, MS, MPH, CPHL
Frederick Asinor has been an educator for the past 20 years and continues to do community-based public health policy research. He has served as Director of the Center for Allied Health Education at Southeastern University in Washington, DC. and has dedicated considerable time to the guinea worm disease and water resources projects in Cape Verde, Liberia, Ghana and Nigeria, visiting more than 182 villages and working with churches and community based organizations to teach water purification and storage to the locals.
Appointments: Acting Director of Continuing Professional Education and Global Health Resources, The American Public Health Association (APHA); Associate Faculty in the Department of Population and Family Health Sciences, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; Associate Director, Community Education Program, Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute; Adjunct Associate Professor in Health Care Administration and Communication, Sojourner-Douglass College; Director of the Institute for Physician Leadership for the Pennsylvania Medical Society; Associate Residency Program Director & Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at Morehouse School of Medicine; Adjunct Assistant Professor of Family and Community Medicine at Penn State University College of Medicine; Adjunct Assistant Professor of Community Health at the University of Ghana Medical School.
Raised in Ghana, Connecticut and Southern California, Dr. Asinor holds the following academic credentials: Bachelor of Arts (Cum Laude), Morehouse College, (Journalism & International Relations); Master of Science, Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University. (Journalism); Doctor of Education, Atlanta University, (Higher Education Administration and Policy Studies); MPH, Robert W. Woodruff Health Science Center, The Rollins School of Public Health of Emory University. (Public Health Policy and Management); Post Graduate Certificate, Public Health Leadership, University of Alabama at Birmingham MidSouth Program for Public Health Practice (Public Health); Post Graduate Certificate, Non-Profit Studies, The Johns Hopkins University Institute for Policy Studies, Center for Civil Society (Non-Profit Management).
Ato Micah, M.B.A.
Ato Micah contributes extensive experience in both public and business world to the Board. His public service work include: an internship at The US Senate (Office of Senator Kent Conrad) and volunteered on numerous advocacy organizations related to Education and Healthcare.
He currently manages a $70M+ business line for a Consumer Packaged Company based in Southern Ohio. His signature issues are mainly building Ghana’s infrastructure in Education and Healthcare fields. Ato is an alum of Oberlin College and University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business.
