Our Team

Rochelle Dicker, MD – Professor-in-Residence of Surgery

Dr. Rochelle Dicker is Professor of Surgery and Anesthesia and Vice Chair for Critical Care at UCLA. She is the Co-Director of the Program for the Advancement of Surgical Equity. She graduated medical school AOA from University of Vermont. Her surgical residency was spent at UC San Francisco and the University of Vermont. She then went on to complete her Trauma and Critical Care fellowship at UCSF. During this time, she also completed a Fellowship in Violence Prevention through the California Wellness Foundation. In 2004 she started the Wraparound Project at San Francisco General Hospital when she joined the UCSF faculty. Wraparound is one of the founding members of the Health Alliance for Violence Intervention, a network of now over 40 nationwide hospital-based violence intervention programs and she serves as the Board Chair. She has conducted extensive research on the effectiveness and cost effectiveness of violence intervention. Dr. Dicker is the Vice Chair of the American College of Surgeons COT Injury Prevention and Control Committee and leads the efforts for a committee charged with Improving the Social Determinants to Attenuate ViolencE (ISAVE). Dr. Dicker was an early partner with the SF Department of Public Health’s Vision Zero efforts and has studied the role of mental illness in unintentional injury. In addition to the injury prevention work, Dr. Dicker is involved in global surgery and has a long-standing partnership in Soroti, Uganda to aid in research and capacity building for their regional referral hospital. She has contributed to over 90 peer-reviewed publications and several book chapters.

Catherine Juillard, MD, MPH – Associate Professor-in-Residence of Surgery

Dr. Juillard is a surgeon who has her roots in public health. Before going to medical school, Dr. Juillard was a rural health volunteer for the Peace Corps in Senegal, West Africa, which is where her interest in public health and health equity were cemented. As a surgeon, Dr. Juillard’s main research interests are identifying risk factors driving disparities in susceptibility to surgically treated diseases and inequity in access to treatment, then creating ways to mitigate these disparities. She looks to apply public health research principles to these issues in order to develop innovative solutions.

Dr. Juillard went to Stanford University for undergraduate studies, then the University of California, Los Angeles, for medical school and general surgery residency. She completed a fellowship in trauma and surgical critical care at the University of California, San Francisco, where she stayed on as faculty until 2018. While at UCSF, Dr. Juillard was the founding co-Director for the Center for Global Surgical Studies and the Director of the Wraparound Program at San Francisco General Hospital. In 2018, Dr. Juillard joined the faculty at UCLA and co-founded the Program for the Advancement for Surgical Equity in the Department of Surgery.

Shant Shekherdemian, MD - Assistant Professor-in-Residence of Surgery

Dr. Shekherdimian is an assistant professor of surgery in the Division of Pediatric Surgery at UCLA and director of the pediatric trauma program at Northridge Hospital. Shant has mentored over 15 medical students and residents on global health projects, many of which resulting in academic presentations and publications. Shant’s global health work is geographically focused in the Former Soviet Republics, specifically in Armenia, where he serves as an advisor to the Minister of Health. Shant is actively involved in projects to improve medical education, develop a national oncology strategy, enhance quality assurance/improvement strategy for the Ministry of Health, and optimize diaspora engagement in healthcare. Shant is the recipient of a Fulbright US Scholar award in support of his global health work.

Daniel DeUgarte, MD, MS - Clinical Professor of Surgery

Dr. DeUgarte is a Professor of Clinical Surgery in the Division of Pediatric Surgery at UCLA and Chief of Pediatric Surgery at Harbor-UCLA.  He also serves as the Director of Global Health Medical Student Research for the Global Health Program of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.  For the past decade, Dr. DeUgarte has been helping build pediatric surgical capacity in Mozambique with the development of partnerships, training workshops, bilateral exchanges, and clinical research.  Dr. DeUgarte's interests include the implementation of quality improvement projects in limited-resource settings, including in Los Angeles public hospitals.

Dr. Alan Hubbard

Dr. Hubbard is a Professor of Biostatistics at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on the application of statistics to population studies with particular expertise in semi-parametric models and the use of machine learning in causal inference, as well as applications in high dimensional biology. Applied work ranges from the molecular biology of aging, wildlife biology, social epidemiology, infectious disease and acute trauma. He is particularly interested in harnessing machine-learning algorithms and advances in semiparametric causal inference towards machines for optimizing the estimation of parameters related to causal inference/variable importance, with particular emphasis on discovering and estimating the impact of treatment rules. In addition, he is currently exploring the application of data-adaptive target parameter approaches to formalize asymptotics for exploratory data analysis, to allow for a lack of a priori specified hypotheses while still providing an estimation of meaningful parameters and estimators with predictable sampling distributions.

Dr. Sandra McCoy

Sandra McCoy is an Associate Professor in the Division of Epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health. She studies how social, economic, and cultural forces influence disease transmission and health outcomes. During the past several years, Dr. McCoy has explored these relationships through the lens of HIV infection and reproductive health. Using a diverse array of approaches including behavioral science and implementation science, her goal is to identify innovative, cost-effective, and scalable interventions to overcome global health challenges.

Melissa Carvalho, MPH - Global Surgery Program Manager

Melissa manages global surgery research projects for PASE at the University of California Los Angeles. She graduated from McGill University in 2011 with a Bachelor of Science in Microbiology & Immunology. Melissa received a Master of Public Health in 2016 from Yale University with a concentration in Chronic Disease Epidemiology. She has extensive global health research experience in Sub-Saharan Africa, and has been involved in projects aiming to strengthen surgical systems and address barriers in access to quality surgical care for a wide range of conditions. Melissa’s research interests lie in optimizing the delivery and organization of care for non-communicable diseases in resource-constrained settings using implementation science approaches.

Rasheedat Oke, MD MPH – Global Surgery Program Manager

Rasheedat Oke, MD, MPH is one of the Global Surgery program managers at PASE, University of California, Los Angeles. She is a foreign-trained physician with specialty training in public health. She then received her MPH from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Maryland with a certificate in Epidemiology for Public Health Professionals. She has experience collaborating in various academic, clinical, and programmatic settings. She is also experienced working with diverse populations including underserved and vulnerable populations in LMICs. Rasheedat has interests in implementation science and global surgery presents an opportunity to work both with vulnerable populations while tackling different aspects of program implementation.

Emily Maitino, MPH – Injury Prevention Professional

Emily coordinates the injury prevention research activities for PASE. She graduated from University of California, Santa Barbara in 2015 with a B.A. in Global Studies and received her M.P.H. from the USC School of Medicine in 2018 with an emphasis in Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Prior to joining UCLA, she previously conducted HIV research with the Los Angeles LGBT Center. Her interest in injury prevention comes from her focus on vulnerable populations, and other research interests include environmental health and women’s health.

Benjamin Francis – Administrative Analyst

Ben provides administrative support for the PASE team, in addition to supporting the Surgical Critical Care team in the Division of General Surgery. Ben graduated from the University of Sussex with a Bachelor of Arts in 2008 with a concentration on gender inequity in contemporary architecture practice. Prior to joining UCLA, Ben worked in operations management for public health at the Centre for Disease Control in Vancouver, Canada and was the business lead for the Digital Health team for the UK Government Department of Health.