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Yosefa Gilon serves as the Associate Director, Global Health Education for Stanford’s Center for Innovation in Global Health, supporting all global health education initiatives. Yosefa joined Stanford University in 2014, where she managed short-term international programs at the Bing Overseas Studies Program. One of the programs she managed was the Community Health in Oaxaca course, an exciting opportunity for undergraduate students interested in community and global health. In 2019 she joined Stanford’s Computer Science Department where she managed international computer science education programs. She joined CIGH in 2022.

Yosefa has a B.A. in Psychology from U.C. Irvine and a M.A. in International Education from the School for International Training. She is very passionate about education equity and international education and has facilitated experiential education opportunities all over the world. While serving as the Logistics Director for THINK Global School, a traveling high school, she lived and worked in Argentina, Bhutan, Ecuador, Germany, India, Japan, and Thailand.

She is very excited to be collaborating with people across the university and beyond to bring global health education opportunities to the Stanford community.Feel free to reach out to her about anything global health education related.

Erika Veidis is the Human and Planetary Health Manager for the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health. Before joining the CIGH team, she spent three years at the Planetary Health Alliance, a non-profit organization housed at Harvard University focused on understanding and addressing the intersections between global environmental challenges and public health. In this role, she managed a global network of universities, NGOs, research institutes, and government entities and led community engagement, outreach, and education efforts. In addition to her work with the PHA, Erika conducted research in environmental economics, with a particular focus on microplastics and grassroots campaigns targeting relevant governmental and corporate policies, and advanced regenerative agriculture in rural Wisconsin. Most recently, Erika helped to launch a project highlighting Indigenous place names across California with the California Institute for Community, Art & Nature, which she continues to pursue on the side.

Erika graduated from Harvard in 2015 with a BA in Government and Mind/Brain/Behavior, holds an MBA from Cal Poly, and serves on the board of the Harvard Alumni for Agriculture and Food. She believes in the importance of integrated environmental and health action, locally-rooted economies, and cultivating a sense of responsibility to place. In her free time, she skis, hikes, writes, plays guitar, and enjoys spending time – especially outside – with family, friends, and the Latvian community.

Cristina has 15+ years of administrative and operations experience. She worked for UCSF for four years before joining Stanford University. She worked for Radiation Oncology for two years and Stanford Humanities and Sciences for eight+ years as an executive assistant and office manager supporting the principal investigator and executive director. Cristina earned a bachelor’s degree in Business Management with an emphasis in Banking and Finance from Saint Paul College in Manila, Philippines. Cristina speaks three languages: Tagalog, English, and Spanish (not fluent). Her personal interests include spending time with her granddaughter, hiking and exercising, reading, cooking, volunteering, and more.

Narmin Karimli joined the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health as a program coordinator in March 2023. She is mostly in charge of financial inquiries and event organizing. Narmin had always wanted to work in finance, so she started with Wells Fargo Bank in 2019 after earning a B.S. in economics from California East Bay University.

Narmin loves to travel and learn about different cultures, history, and cuisine. Narmin is a pianist as well as a mathematician. She went to musical school for seven years and graduated with a red diploma. She speaks Azerbaijani, Turkish, English, and Russian.

She married in 2019 and has two daughters: Ela and Banu.

Kelsey Fisher serves as the Program Manager of the African Scholars in Global Health Program for Stanford’s Center for Innovation in Global Health. Kelsey returned to Stanford in December 2023, after nearly a decade managing programs to improve health equity, livelihoods and education access, with a focus in Sub-Saharan Africa. Most recently, Kelsey managed a portfolio of health systems strengthening programs at GAIA Global Health, where she managed GAIA’s scholarship and fellowship programs for nursing students and new graduates in Malawi. Before getting started in international development, Kelsey worked in Academic Services at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, where she supported faculty and curriculum planning.  

Kelsey has a B.A. in Communications from California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo) and an M.S. in Public Administration from San Jose State. She is passionate about health equity and improving education access in hard-to-reach areas. In her free time, Kelsey loves exploring San Francisco, hiking, running, seeing live music, and spending quality time with family and friends. 

Ola serves as a research assistant for Stanford’s Center for Innovation in Global Health supporting different efforts in education and research. She has been involved with vulnerable populations in different capacities for more than 10 years. Ola’s areas of interest include forced displacement with focus on refugees, and women’s health. Her passion for global health and refugees stems from her personal experience in armed conflict and her own journey as a resettled refugee. Previously she served as the regional coordinator for International Services at the American Red Cross where she mostly worked with refugees and immigrants. She supported the establishment of the Refugee and Asylum-Seeker Health Initiative (RAHI) at UCSF that focuses on research, education and community engagement and she serves as both a steering committee member and research coordinator. Ola earned her B.A. in Molecular and Cell Biology with a minor in Global Poverty and Practice from UC Berkeley. She also holds an M.S. in Global Health Sciences from UCSF. She is fluent in English and Arabic and has a big interest in different languages.

LourDrick Valsote (‘24) is a junior at Stanford majoring in Human Biology with a concentration in Cognitive and Developmental Neuroscience. His global health interests center around how policies can be implemented to promote better health and education outcomes in urban and rural communities in his home country of the Philippines. He serves as Social Media and Digital Outreach Assistant, sharing the work of CIGH and its fellows through digital communications.

At Stanford, LourDrick currently serves as Design and Publicity Co-Chair of the Pilipino American Student Union and Co-President of Stanford Taekwondo. He also works in the Knowles Lab, where he researches forms of pediatric epilepsy. In his free time, LourDrick can be found skateboarding around campus and filming videos for his YouTube channel.