Dr. Abdullah Baqui is an associate professor in the Health Systems Program of the Department of International Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is trained in medicine, public health, heath systems, infectious diseases, and epidemiology. He has extensive experience in public health research, training, education, and policy advocacy. He joined the Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2000. Before joining the school, he served as a project director and a program director at ICDDR, B in Bangladesh and worked on research related to newborn and child health, urban health, and nutritional problems. He has more than 25 years experience of conducting clinical and community trials, setting up surveillance and surveys, and managing large data sets. His current research interests include design and evaluation of health interventions to improve health and survival of mothers and children, particularly newborn babies and evaluation of preventive and curative health service programs in low- and middle-income countries. He is involved in field trials of vaccines, micronutrients and nutritional interventions.

His other interests are related to the use of evidence in policy and programs, including the development of research capacity and the strengthening of public health training and education. As a member of advisory bodies of the international organizations, he assists with the development of policies intended to improve public health, particularly health of mothers and children. He currently has active projects in Bangladesh, India, and Nepal. He has authored more than 50 scientific articles published in peer-reviewed journal and many other reports, working papers and policy briefs. He is a member of the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Health Population and Nutrition and reviewer for several other peer-reviewed journals including American Journal of Epidemiology, American Journal of Public Health, Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, and Bulletin of the World Health Organization.

William Weiss is a research associate in the Health Systems Program of the Department of International Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is also affiliated with the department’s Center for Refugee and Disaster Studies. With the School since 1991 and a faculty member since 1994, Dr. Weiss completed his DrPH in 2004. He has 15 years of experience in design, monitoring, and evaluating programs for maternal and child health, for HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, and for displaced and disaster/conflict-affected populations. His primary research and practice interest is improving public health decision making in resource-constrained settings with appropriate and emerging technologies such as participatory assessments, geographic information systems (GIS), geographic positioning systems (GPS), lot quality assurance sampling (LQAS), and chronic disease (HIV/AIDS) data management systems. Dr. Weiss is an author of several books as well as peer-reviewed articles and scientific presentations. He is an instructor and/or facilitator in the following courses: Health Information Systems, Quality Assurance Management Methods for Developing Countries, Health Systems Program Seminar, Nursing in Humanitarian Emergencies, and Introduction to International Health.

Amnesty LeFevre began working in the field of international public health at the age of 16 with a rabies vaccination program in rural Ecuador. Since then, she has worked extensively throughout South America, Asia, and most recently West Africa. She received a master of health science in health systems degree from the Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2002 and went on to work for the World Health Organization in Cambodia. There, she evaluated its health information system and conducted a cost analysis of its essential service package in government health facilities throughout the country. She returned to Johns Hopkins shortly thereafter to pursue a PhD in health policy and financing, specializing in economic evaluation. She joined the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health as faculty in 2004.

To date, her research interests remain focused on economic evaluation—specifically, conducting costing and cost-effectiveness studies in low-income countries. This includes work with Save the Children's Saving Newborn Lives Initiative (in collaboration with Hugh Waters) to evaluate several community-based neonatal health interventions in Bangladesh, Mali, Nepal, Pakistan, and Indonesia. In addition, Amnesty (and Hugh Waters) is currently funded by USAID to determine the cost-effectiveness of zinc supplementation for treating diarrhea in children under five in India, Mali, and Pakistan. In 2006, Amnesty will expand her current work in Mali to include a costing evaluation of a national Vitamin A distribution. As part of this work, she’ll expand her focus to derive sustainable solutions for delivering Vitamin A by improving the efficiency of resource allocation at the district level.

Dr. Orlova serves as a member of the Executive Committee of the National Library of Medicine's Training Program on Health Sciences Informatics at Johns Hopkins and is also a lead faculty at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Public Health Informatics Program at Johns Hopkins. She received her PhD from the Moscow State University, Russia, in 1985 and began her informatics career at the All-Union Institute of Scientific and Technical Information in Moscow, Russia. From 1988–1991, she was a principal investigator for the development of the USSR Information Systems on Industrial Wastes for the Ministries of Geology, Non-Ferrous Metallurgy, Coal Industry, Petrochemical Industry and the USSR State Committee for Gold and Diamond Industries. During 1992–2001, she worked on lead poisoning prevention first at Princeton University and then at Johns Hopkins before returning back to her informatics career.

Dr. Orlova’s informatics interests are in the areas of the electronic health record (EHR), applications for public health, clinical and public health systems interoperability, and public health data and system standardization. She has been teaching public health informatics courses at Johns Hopkins since 2002. She is an author and co-author of numerous scientific publications and presentations at national and international health information technology forums.