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.

Betelehem Asnake, MD

Born and raised in Ethiopia, Dr. Beti Asnake migrated to Los Angeles when she was 16 years old. She attended UCLA for undergrad, then endured 6 long cold winters in the East Coast for graduate and medical school at the University of Virginia. She did her intern year at UC San Diego and residency at UC Davis. After her fellowship in Global Health & Equity in Anesthesia at UCSF, she spent a year working at Kaiser in Northern California. She is glad to be back to academics where she hopes to work on global health initiatives and health equity curriculums for trainees in the department. She is also the founder of an independent UIM mentorship program she has helped run for the last 2 years. During her free time, she likes to spend time with her family, travel and cook.

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.

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 over a decade of public health 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.

Cindy Sagoe Umoh, MPH - Global Surgery Program Manager

Cindy Sagoe Umoh, MPH is a Global Surgery program manager at PASE, University of California, Los Angeles involved in projects aiming to strengthen surgical systems and address barriers to access to quality surgical care. She has a background in Pharmacy and received an MPH from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Maryland in 2018. Cindy has extensive experience working with diverse communities including Indigenous communities and underserved communities in clinical care and public health in Sub-Saharan Africa and the United States. Cindy’s interests in global health include developing and implementing sustainable prevention strategies and improving access to health care for underserved and vulnerable populations, her other research interests include substance misuse prevention and addiction treatment.

Daniela Salinas, MPH - Injury Prevention Professional

Daniela manages the local and domestic projects and research activities for PASE. She received her B.S. in Public Health with an emphasis in Community Health Education in 2017 from Western Illinois University and is a recent 2022 graduate from California State University, Northridge receiving an M.P.H. in Applied Epidemiology. Prior to starting at UCLA, her professional experience included working with homeless women and children. This pushed her to seek an advanced degree and focus on other avenues to help combat health inequities amongst historically marginalized and vulnerable populations. Now, it is of primary interest to work in injury prevention and address the root issues in public health to improve health outcomes. Other research interests include women’s health, physical activity, and homeless Latinx youth.