Kendra Martinez, M.D.

Kendra Martinez completed her medical training at the University of Texas Southwestern where she had the opportunity to complete a project in rural Papua New Guinea. There she discovered her joint passions of neonatology and global health. Since then Kendra moved to Minnesota for the rich global health support within the pediatric residency program. She spent 2 months working in Arusha, Tanzania during her second year of residency and helped create a neonatal manual now published in Tanzania. She is excited to return to Tanzania in January 2022 where she will continue ongoing efforts to broaden neonatal training throughout northern Tanzania. Additionally, Kendra is looking forward to meeting with residents interested in traveling abroad in order to help them discover their own academic interests. She also aims to explore opportunities to further integrate global health topics within the residency education. Outside of work, Kendra enjoys spending time with her husband (Jarian), infant son (Luca), and border collie (Boy Scout). She can frequently be found exploring coffee shops and ice cream parlors throughout the Twin Cities. 

Phillip Plager, M.D.

Phil Plager studied political science at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. He has had a longstanding interest in legislative advocacy, education, and strategies in communication and messaging. Phil’s passion for global health started while working in Rwanda for an education non-profit organization in the 2 years following undergraduate. There he found a connection at a local diabetes clinic. Meeting with adolescent patients and listening to their stories, challenges, tips, and advice for others, prompted his return to training.  He completed his medical degree from the University of Minnesota. His academic interests include global pediatric diabetes, AI/AN health, legislative advocacy, and communication and connection across differences. Next year he is excited to build on a growing partnership with the Sicangu Oyate Lakota in Rosebud, South Dakota. He is looking forward to meeting with residents to explore individual career goals and how to make the most of their global health experience while in training. Most of his hobbies revolve around a theme of watching the sun reflect off plants or water. Also, as a member of the Minnesota Mycological Society, he can occasionally be found foraging for fungi in dimly lit forests.

David Mills, MD,  Fellow in Pediatric Emergency Medicine and Global Health, Boston Children’s Hospital, Instructor in Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School

Greetings to everyone in the Global Pediatrics track!  My name is David Mills, I am one of the recent (still feels like yesterday) grads from the UMN pediatrics residency program.  Shortly after graduation, I moved to Boston to pursue a dual fellowship in pediatric emergency medicine and global health at Boston Children’s hospital.  My global health interests include pediatric resuscitation in the resource constrained setting, the intersection of health and human rights, and health care delivery in humanitarian settings. I’ve gained experience in these fields through work in program implementation, research, and advocacy. 

During fellowship, I’ve had the opportunity to work in Rwanda, Liberia, Palestine, and remotely with partners in the other locations in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa. The majority of the work I do takes place in the Palestinian territories where I’ve had the opportunity to partner with the Ministry of Health and an NGO to support pediatric resuscitation and implementation of pediatric early warning scores in pediatric oncology wards in both the Gaza Strip and West Bank.  As part of this program, we understood that local providers had limited or no access to resuscitation training due to prohibitive costs of international training programs, thus we partnered with Palestinian providers to develop a locally contextualized resuscitation curriculum for physicians and nurses. The next phase of the program will be to integrate the resuscitation curriculum into the MOH pediatric resuscitation credentialing system that will be sustainable and disseminated by the MOH system.

During the covid-19 pandemic I had the opportunity to work with a team from the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative to partner with the WHO and the Global Health Cluster covid-19 task force team to undertake a qualitative research study to understand the technical and operational challenges in covid-19 responses in six humanitarian settings.  The work was done all remotely through surveys and interviews—an interesting example of how covid-19 has helped us all in global health to reimagine how we do our work.  

It is great to connect (and re-connect) with everyone, so please feel free to reach out with any questions, or to just say hello.

All the best,

David

David.Mills@childrens.harvard.edu