Xavier Coughlin, MD, President

Xavier Coughlin has been a member of DGH since 2012 after being introduced to the work of DGH while finishing medical school. He is currently working as an emergency medicine doctor in Pittsfield, MA, and Newburgh, NY. He attended Boston University for medical school and trained at Bellevue/NYU in NYC. Xavier worked with DGH in El Salvador and Chiapas as well as participated in the Volunteer Committee.

In addition, he was the coordinator for two service-learning programs in medical school, conducted health autonomy research with the Greek Solidarity clinics and the region of Rojava, and did medical work in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Over the last three years, he has been working with the Woodbine Health Autonomy group in Queens, NY, running a podcast about exploring health autonomy and liberatory forms of health, as well as seeking to develop a free integrative medicine clinic in upstate NY.

For Xavier, DGH has been influential in his development. From supporting CoCoSI in their battle against outdated beliefs and infrastructures to the mountains of Chiapas, working alongside the local health promoters, he is humbled to be part of a long lineage of people who are working towards the creation of a new world. He will continue to bring the variety of clinical and logistical skills he has to address the goals of a radical understanding of health.

He hopes to build upon the foundations of DGH as a bastion of liberation medicine, to humbly listen to the communities DGH accompanies, as well as work to realize a new paradigm of health and revolutionary action that begins to answer the apocalypse in which we find ourselves. (Board term: 2021-2024)

Michéle Brothers, MIA, Co-Vice President

Michéle Brothers, who is Franco-American, arrived in Paris in 1985 from her hometown of New York, where she had worked with the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). She was manager of International Development at Médecins du Monde in Paris and the MDM representative in New York with the U.S. delegation during 2000-01. Michéle founded and manages International Connections, a small consulting group based in Paris. She received degrees from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and an MIA from the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs in NY.

She is a founding member of Women in Film France and is on the board of AARO (Association of American Residents Overseas). Michéle, who has previously been a DGH Advisory Council member, is particularly interested in DGH’s whole approach and the use of the arts to reach out, exchange ideas with, and inform populations about health and human rights concerns. (Board Term: 2021-2024)

Shamsher Samra, MD, Co-Vice President, Local Volunteer, and Human Rights and Advocacy Co-Chair

Shamsher Samra is a Health Sciences assistant clinical professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Harbor UCLA. He works on developing the Whole Person Care initiative in Los Angeles, a community health worker-based program aimed at achieving health equity for vulnerable populations in LA County, with a focus on jail and prison reentry. He has an interest in applying the liberation medicine framework to his work with community-based organizations on slum housing conditions in South LA and migrant populations and deportees in Los Angeles and Tijuana. He has volunteered with DGH in El Salvador, Oaxaca, and Chiapas and researched inequities in World Bank water programs in India. (Board Term: 2020-2023)

Shirley Novak, MA, Treasurer (CFO)

Shirley Novak is a founding member of the DGH Board. She has participated in El Salvador solidarity work since 1984, through Syracuse Covenant Sanctuary, an NGO that advocated for and protected undocumented Salvadoran refugees in the US. From 1993 through 2016, she coordinated the Syracuse, NY – La Estancia Sister Community in rural El Salvador, organizing annual delegations and fundraising efforts for development projects.

Shirley is a former teacher of immigrant adults learning English and an Early Childhood and Family Educator in a bilingual preschool program and now retired from a more than 20-year position as a bilingual special education teacher of developmentally delayed Latino preschoolers in Syracuse, NY. She remains active in her local community, currently serving on the board of The Syracuse Center for Peace and Social Justice. (Board Term: 2022-2025)

Patty Medina, MPH, Secretary

Patty Medina works as a community health worker in New York City, where she provides support and advocacy for patients and their families, helping them navigate the healthcare system and addressing social determinants of health. Additionally, she is a research intern at the Blasberg lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where she is collaborating on a manuscript on checkpoint inhibition and supports Dr. Gershon at NYU with public health research.

Patty was a 2020 Global Health Disparities Research Fellow at Mt. Sinai, where she conducted research on COVID-19, digital technology, health literacy, and cultural competency. Patty has a passion for global public health, the intersectionality between health and social determinants of health, and addressing systemic gaps in accessing health care. Her volunteer experience has provided her with the opportunities to travel to Panama, Nicaragua, and Ghana, where she served as an interpreter, pharmacist apprentice, and researcher.

Patty has her MPH in Global Public Health and an Advanced Certificate in Disaster Science, Policy, and Practice from New York University School of Global Public Health. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology and French, as well as a minor in Anthropology from Santa Clara University. Patty also obtained certificates in Infectious Diseases & Infectious Control; Contemporary & Alternative Health; Legal & Ethical Issues in Healthcare; and Nutrition, Chronic Disease & Health Promotion. (Board term: 2020-2023)

Audrey Lenhart, PhD, MPH, Registrar

Audrey Lenhart is the Chief of the Entomology Branch in the Division of Parasitic Diseases and Malaria at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Audrey Lenhart most recently served as a research entomologist in the Entomology Branch, where she led the Insecticide Resistance and Vector Control Team. In that role, she coordinated the entomology activities in the USAID-funded Latin America and Caribbean Regional Malaria Program and led the CDC’s portfolio of international vector-related activities for Zika. Her team provided technical assistance throughout the Americas, Asia, and Africa regarding vector surveillance and control, including support to the U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative on insecticide resistance surveillance. Lenhart led a research group that focuses on the biology and control of mosquitoes, and her laboratory applied cutting-edge next-generation techniques to identify the molecular mechanisms that cause insecticide resistance in mosquito vectors of human disease.

Dr. Lenhart is a founding member of PAHO’s Technical Advisory Group for Public Health Entomology in the Americas, and is a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) Vector Control Advisory Group. She is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and adjunct faculty in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Emory University.

Dr. Lenhart earned her PhD from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and MPH from Emory University. (Board term: 2021-2024)

Elvis “Peter” Nataren, Local Volunteer and Human Rights and Advocacy Co-Chair

Elvis “Peter” Nataren joins us from one of our partner communities, Santa Marta, El Salvador. Over the last 10 years, he has worked on solidarity and emancipation movements with Cuba and Palestine and has also been developing an organic agriculture movement, including an educational farm to teach this trade to community members in Santa Marta. He is also involved with various youth education programs in Santa Marta. (Board Term: 2022-2025)

Lanny Smith, MD, MPH, DTM&H, Liberation Medicine Counsel & President’s Council of Honor Member

Lanny Smith is the founding president of DGH and is a Global Community Health Advisor at Southern Jamaica Plain Health Center of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in the Division of General Medicine and Primary Care, Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Assistant Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Adjunct Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at Montefiore Medical Center, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Departments of Medicine and Family & Social Medicine. After 12 years as a practicing community health physician in the South Bronx, he now lives in Jamaica Plain, MA, and continues as a clinician-educator in primary care.

For six and a half years (1992-8), Lanny served as the volunteer Coordinator of the Salvadoran Mission of “Médecins du Monde-France” (Physicians of the World-France) in Morazán, El Salvador (a program using “health as reconciliation” and responsible for “building health where the peace is new” through community health promoters, daycare centers, women’s rights programs, clinic-schools, a bridge and other means). From that experience, he recognized the need for an organization like Doctors for Global Health and also pioneered the concept of Liberation Medicine (the conscious, conscientious use of health to promote social justice and human dignity).

He has also helped found and serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Social Medicine, www.socialmedicine.info, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal published in Spanish and English, serving the diverse international community of people working in social medicine and health activism. (Board Term: 2022-2025)

Calla Brown, MD

Calla Brown is an academic general pediatrics fellow in the Division of General Pediatrics and Adolescent Health and is pursuing a master’s degree in human rights at the University of Minnesota. She practices as a med/peds primary care physician at the Community University Health Care Center, an FQHC in Minneapolis. Her interest in community health blossomed while serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Youth and Families program on the southern coast of Ecuador from 2003-2005.

During medical school at the University of Rochester, she had the opportunity to further follow this passion as a volunteer with DGH in Estancia, El Salvador, for the 2009-2010 academic year, alongside her now husband. Following med/peds residency at the University of Minnesota, she spent a chief resident year developing teaching skills and precepting trainees in the hospital and clinic.

More recently, she had the opportunity during the 2016-2017 academic year to volunteer as a physician educator with Seed Global Health at the College of Medicine of Malawi, Lilongwe campus, teaching in the third-year medical school internal medicine clerkship and providing clinical education for trainees on the internal medicine wards. Her interests include medical education and human resources for health, asset-based community health, care that promotes the bio-psycho-social determinants of health, and human rights. (Board term: 2022-2025)

Gilberto Granados, MD, MPH

Gilberto Granados attained his medical education at the UC Irvine School of Medicine. He trained in Family Medicine at White Memorial Medical Center and went on to obtain his Master’s Degree in Public Health at the UCLA School of Public Health, where he studied Health Policy and Maternal and Child Health.

He is currently an Associate Clinical Professor with the Department of Family Medicine at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. He is the clerkship site director for both the required 3rd year and elective sub-internship in his as well as for the 3rd year Family Medicine rotation at Charles Drew University School of Medicine. He served on the Medical Executive Committee at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. He is also the Co-Director of the Summer Urban Health Fellowship which is a health professional pipeline program serving mostly disadvantaged students. He is also involved in community-based research with an interest in immigrant populations’s access to health care.

He also serves on the executive board for the Programs in Medical Education (PRIME) program at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and on the admissions committee. He served on the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine Program Committee from 2011 through 2014 and currently serves on the STFM Foundation Board of Trustees and is the Chair of the New Faculty Scholars Program for STFM.

Dr. Granados has also been involved in international health work and has been a member of Doctors for many years. He has worked mainly in Chiapas, Mexico, at the Hospital San Carlos in Altamirano and accompanied Dr. Juan Manuel Canales in the Zapatista communities from 2006 till 2017 (two-week sessions). He has also taken a group of Family Medicine residents to Sota, Tanzania, where he conducted a needs assessment with local doctors and public health teachers in 2007 (two weeks). More recently, he did brief work in Moria, Greece, assisting at a Syrian refugee camp in 2018. (Board term: 2020-2023)

Nimeka Phillip, MD

Nimeka Phillip is a board-certified family physician who was born in Alaska and grew up in California. She attended the University of California in Berkley, CA, where she studied public health. Her first international experience was working with researchers in South Africa to prevent vertical transmission of HIV. She then went on to Havana, Cuba, for medical school at the Latin American School of Medicine. Dr. Phillip completed her residency in Family Medicine at Mountain Area Health Education Center in Hendersonville, NC, and then went on to do an Obstetrics Fellowship at Cone Health in Greensboro, NC.

She currently works at a rural health clinic and hospital in southeast Arizona, where she does full spectrum family medicine, and part-time at a tribal clinic in rural northern California. Dr. Phillip became involved in DGH at the Atlanta meeting in 2017 and has since been a presenter at the Austin meeting and PHM in Bangladesh. She is excited for the opportunity to serve on the DGH board and continue to advocate for international wellness and justice. (Board term: 2020-2023)