Interview with Team Members of the Global Health Impact Project

A couple months back, Heawon Kim, a student of Nicole Hassoun's Global Health course, conducted an interview on Professor Hassoun regarding the Global Health Impact Project. In order to provide further insight into the project, I have interview two more team members.

Angelina Sung is an undergraduate psychology and philosophy double major at Carnegie Mellon University. Sung has been involved in the Global Health Impact project since 2010. Sung’s former research team member, George Nardi also attended Carnegie Mellon, majoring in Ethics, History, and Public Policy. He served as a research assistant from 2011-2012. Below is an interview with both Sung and Nardi conducted by Sharon Cruz, a student of Professor Hassoun’s PHIL456M course: Global Health Impact, offered at Binghamton University.

Cruz: What was your participation in the Global Health Impact Project? Sung: For the Global Health Impact Project, I was responsible for the management and entry of a database for antimalarial and HIV drug efficacies, as well as creating a way to find unavailable country data for antimalarial efficacies. Nardi: Nicole Hassoun was my professor, and I started working on the project when it first got underway. I focused on finding efficacy and data for malaria and doing a systematic review for the disease, in the attempt of making sure that we had as many studies as possible and as much information as possible.

Cruz: Why do you think the Global Health Impact Project is important? Sung: This project is important because information regarding the efficacy of various drugs in different countries are highly accessible. This information is hard to find so the project allows the general public to gain access to country data, efficacy of a drug, and its impact on the country all on one simple platform.

Cruz: What do you think the project can accomplish? Nardi: The project can accomplish a lot so long as people participate. It ts important because you don't hear too much about the things that the project does, these diseases are ravaging so many people in countries and harming them, and it's important that people start considering how many basic things need to be looked at and considered.

Cruz: What inspired you to help with the project? Sung: I wanted to work on this project because I had an interest in biology and philosophy a few years ago and wanted to find a way to combine the two fields. Nardi: What inspired me to help with the project was learning about all the ways that I could make a difference. After I learned a little more about the project, it became clear to me that these kind of small efforts that I can make might have the same sort of reverberating effect. It's that easy to impact somebody - maybe my actions are making a difference even if Im a college student just looking at some medical journals. Maybe these little actions that you take can make exponential effects.