Alumni Directory Display

Alumni Update:

A couple of years ago, Chinook switched from a career of commercial helicopter piloting to being a high school teacher. Chinook works in a small rural school in BC and is halfway through her Masters of Arts in Education.

Naomi grew up on Long Island, NY and graduated from Williams College, where she studied Economics and Public Health. She wrote her undergraduate honors thesis on the effects of cash transfer and empowerment programs on maternal and child well-being in Uganda, for which she was awarded Highest Honors and received the Jack Larned 1942 International Management Prize for a student paper of superior quality dealing with developmental enterprises. She also received the Van Duyne Prize in Economics to support her thesis work throughout her senior year. She spent eight weeks as an intern at IPA in Malawi, where she experienced the difficulties that arise when working in a developing country while also assisting with a project that focused on improving the incomes of small-holder farmers. She spent her junior fall in South Africa studying community health and social policy. After Williams, Naomi interned at HealthRight International, exploring how an international health organization manages both grant opportunities and projects in-country. Prior to her fellowship with Princeton in Africa at the Clinton Health Access Initiative, Naomi was a Research Associate at the Schroeder Center for Health Policy, based at William & Mary, where much of her work focused on domestic healthcare policy.

Alumni Update:

Immediately after PiAf, Amaka attended law school, and then clerked with a federal judge for a year. She then went on to work in the international arbitration practice of the global law firm Shearman & Sterling. In January, she quit to work with a think tank based in Nigeria. She also had a baby last year who’s turning 1 on May 7!

Alumni Update:

Immediately after PiAf, Amaka attended law school, and then clerked with a federal judge for a year. She then went on to work in the international arbitration practice of the global law firm Shearman & Sterling. In January, she quit to work with a think tank based in Nigeria. She also had a baby last year who’s turning 1 on May 7!

Samantha Mendoza graduated from St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas with a degree in English Writing & Rhetoric and minors in English Literature and Global Studies. She mentored students through leadership development programs and writing courses, and as student Body President, she co-founded a program that raised awareness about college sexual assault. She spent a summer studying Peace and Conflict in Uganda and Rwanda, and another summer leading a group of students to volunteer at the an orphanage for HIV-positive youth in Capetown, South Africa. Samantha then earned a prestigious Fulbright fellowship to teach middle-school English in South India. She spent her weekends mentoring high school students through the college application process and taking a 6-hour train to volunteer at a non-profit in Bangalore. Samantha has just completed a Master’s program in Magazine, Newspaper, and Online Journalism at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications to pursue her goal of becoming an international journalist. She currently reports on community issues in Syracuse, New York, and writes about women’s rights, feminism, and politics for a national audience. She will spend the summer interning at NBC Studios before moving to Monduli, Tanzania for a one-year role as the Scholarship and Communications Coordinator at the Indigenous Education Foundation of Tanzania.

Alumni Update:

Rebecca recently finished a Masters in International Development and Management at Lund University in Sweden, and is interested in working in the areas of women’s empowerment, youth leadership, and rural livelihoods.

Fellow Bio:

Becca is from Blairstown, New Jersey and graduated with a degree in Environmental Studies and a minor in Anthropology. While at Davidson, Becca worked for the Office of Sustainability to support new environmental initiatives on campus, and was also a summer Sustainability Scholar and Environmental Justice Intern. She recently studied in India, Senegal, Argentina, and Washington D.C., which allowed her to write a thesis on an urban political ecology of food insecurity. She is passionate about increasing food and environmental literacy among children and adults and hopes to share this while working with the Rwanda School Project. Becca also loves the outdoors and looks forward to running, hiking, and exploring throughout the year in Rwanda.

Alumni Update:

Since his fellowship year, Brent has relocated to Honolulu and is now a Certified Eye Bank Technician. He serves as Director of Operations at the Lions Eye Bank of Hawai’i, an eye tissue recovery and distribution nonprofit dedicated to meeting the transplantation needs of the Hawaiian Islands. His organization works to keep sight-saving eye tissue accessible to the communities that donate it, and he is proud to honor the wishes of eye donors and their families while strengthening the independent medical infrastructure of the Islands.

Fellow Bio:

While pursuing a double major at the intersection of Biomedical Engineering and African Studies at Yale, one of the things Brent enjoyed most was working with his campus chapter of Engineers Without Borders to design and implement infrastructural innovations that reduced water poverty in rural communities in Cameroon and Tanzania. Brent feels lucky to have seen up close the powerful effects that a community-level, locally directed development plan can have on improving health outcomes on the African continent, and so he is grateful for the chance to continue enabling that kind of work with Princeton in Africa, as a Sustainability Fellow at Nyumbani Village in Kenya. In the future, he hopes to use his skills as an engineer, combined with the firsthand knowledge of real-world needs and challenges gained during his fellowship year, to develop more affordable biotechnologies that can help to close resource and personnel gaps in medically underserved parts of the world.

Alumni Update:

Julia is beginning medical school at NYU School of Medicine in New York City. She is excited to be pursuing her passion and looks forward to defining her direction within the practice of healthcare over the next few years.

Fellow Bio:

Julia graduated from Princeton in 2016 with a degree in Molecular Biology and certificates in Quantitative and Computational Biology (QCB) and Neuroscience. Before Princeton, Julia took a gap year in which she worked on a dairy farm in Costa Rica, backpacked in Alaska, and interned for nonprofits and research laboratories. While at Princeton, she sang second soprano in the University Chapel Choir, served on the student board of the Episcopal Church at Princeton and on the Faculty-Student Committee on Discipline, and was a member of the club squash and running teams. She worked for the past two years as an undergraduate researcher on a neuroscience project investigating the connection between the cerebellum and cognitive behavior, and hopes to pursue global medicine after her Princeton in Africa fellowship year in Gaborone, Botswana. She is excited for the challenge and reward of teaching and forming relationships at Maru-a-Pula and for the chance to adventure and explore!

Galeela Michael graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a degree in Global Studies. As an undergraduate, Galeela worked as both a Campaign Lead at the Multicultural Center and as a Student Outreach Coordinator at the Office of Development, where she raised thousands of dollars for student initiatives. She was the President of UC Santa Barbara’s Pan-African Student Union, which served to amplify the voice of African students on campus. Galeela also spent a summer in Washington D.C., where she interned at The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and conducted a research study analyzing the success of the Millennium Development Goals in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Nigeria. After graduating, Galeela returned to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she served as Programs & Operations Manager at a non-profit called /dev/color, which strives to maximize the impact of Black software engineers. Galeela was the third full-time hire at /dev/color, and made substantial contributions to the organization’s foundation, leading efforts to expand /dev/color to four cities nationally. Her experience at /dev/color jumpstarted her career at the intersection between tech and social impact, and today Galeela is most passionate about leveraging technology to improve peoples lives.

Fellow Bio:

Marilyn Michelow ‘07 is a molecular biology major from Pittsburgh, PA. For her PiAF fellowship, Marilyn will be working for the United Nations World Food Program in Windhoek, Namibia. Marilyn has long been fascinated by South Africa (her family is South African), but this will be her first time to Africa. At Princeton, Marilyn worked as a volunteer Emergency Medical Technician with the Princeton First Aid and Rescue Squad, tutored, and was a member of the Tower Club. Through Princeton, she worked in Paris, France, and studied for a semester in Auckland, New Zealand. She is interested in public health and infectious disease, and is deferring medical school to spend a year with PiAF.