Ryan Taylor Anderson, MS, MPH, Gilead Fellow in HBV
Ryan's training focused in the area of HBV. As a Fellow, Ryan was trained to facilitate discussions between representatives from industry, government agencies, patient advocacy, and academia in the areas of drug and diagnostic development for the treatment of chronic hepatitis B infection and HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis. The Forum provided Ryan with an exceptional training in understanding the regulatory perspective of combination treatment for HBV, and an opportunity to work with/train hands-on with HBV and statistical experts at the University of Toronto, in Canada. The output of this training collaboration produced by Ryan includes a very well received late breaker abstract for the ILC 2019 conference, describing a literature review and meta-analysis investigating the strength of association between HBsAg loss and long-term clinical outcome. This work was presented as an abstract at AASLD The Liver Meeting 2019. In addition, he completed and published a white paper to communicate the HBV Forum's guiding principles for conducting drug combination clinical trials, including co-authors from academia, industry and regulatory agencies. Ryan also worked on a project focused on the complex area of monitoring liver safety in the context of underlying HBV infection. This work resulted in a paper, which was published in 2019 in J. Viral Hept. Ryan obtained a bachelor’s degree in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology from the University of Colorado, a MS in Physiology and Biophysics from Georgetown, and an MPH with a concentration in Health Policy and Management from the University of California, Berkeley.
Angela Monahan, UC Berkeley MPH '20, Graduate Intern
Angela is a graduate student intern at the Forum for Collaborative Research. She is currently pursuing her Master's of Public Health at UC Berkeley with an emphasis in Infectious Disease and Vaccinology. She completed her B.S. in Public Health in 2018 from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. As most do, she first became interested in infectious diseases while watching the 1996 film Outbreak in high school and discussing public health opportunities with a member of the CDC Quarantine Unit in Hawaii. Ever since, she's actively worked towards a career in public health and aspires to be an infectious disease physician working in the global health field.
Leighla Dergham, University of Maryland, Public Health Science BS '20, Undergraduate Intern
Leighla is an undergraduate student intern at the Forum for Collaborative Research. She is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Public Health Science at the University of Maryland. She plans to pursue a career in health care, after completing a physician assistant graduate program and obtaining her MPH. She hopes to use the knowledge obtained at The Forum to provide modernized medical aid to underserved communities.
