Project Leadership
Dr. Stephanie Watson-Grant (JSI) is the CHISU Program Director. Dr. Watson-Grant has over 17 years’ experience in the fields of international health and development and ten years in a management role on MEASURE Evaluation. She brings expertise in community development, research and planning, strategic leadership, and program management, including roles with USAID and UNAIDS. Dr. Watson-Grant has experience in routine monitoring with mHealth resources, outcome monitoring, outcome evaluation, evaluation capacity building, and causal loop mapping to assess risks to task shifting from facilities to communities. Dr. Watson-Grant’s publications focus on measurement of country ownership, monitoring and evaluation, and routine health information systems in global health. She is an adjunct professor with the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Derek Kunaka (JSI) is the CHISU Program Deputy Director, Technical. Mr. Kunaka is an information systems specialist with over 22 years of experience in designing and implementing management information systems (MIS) projects in the private and public sectors. Prior to CHISU, Mr. Kunaka was the Senior HIS Advisor for USAID’s MEASURE Evaluation project, where he provided technical advisory services in M&E and HIS to government ministries of health, and social development and strategic planning support from the national to the facility level in several countries in Francophone and Anglophone Africa. He has been an Activity Manager for USAID at a country mission and a Project Director for consecutive bilateral projects on health information systems strengthening at the country and regional level. Mr. Kunaka is exceptionally skilled at stakeholder management, project design and evaluation, strategy development, implementation, capacity building, financial management, and performance management. He is a guest lecturer on HIS at the University of Pretoria’s School of Public Health and the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Joni Bowling (JSI) is the CHISU Program Deputy Director, Operations. Ms. Bowling has expertise in the financial, management, and operational aspects of large, complex international awards. She brings financial and administrative management experience combined with more than 15 years of operational experience in centrally funded USAID global health and education projects. Ms. Bowling has managed awards of more than $850 million in federal funding in over 45 countries and many regions. She has experience in project, donor, and partner management; human resources; finances; audit; contracting; data reporting and analysis; cost sharing; and financial transactions from start-up to closeout. She develops and maintains transparent working relationships with donor and project teams, as well as collaborating agencies.
Adam Preston (RTI) is a Digital Health Advisor within the International Development Group at RTI International. He has more than 20 years of experience in health information systems, software engineering, and technical project management on projects in Haiti, the Philippines, Ethiopia, Guinea, Tanzania, Jordan, and the West Bank. Mr. Preston is a listed member of the World Health Organization Digital Health Technical Advisory Group Roster of Experts and actively participates in other work groups such as OpenHIE, Digital Health and Interoperability Working Group and the Community Health Toolkit User Group. Adam has been with RTI for a decade and is based in Fort Collins, Colorado. When not several indents deep in Python, he enjoys going on hikes with his dog Judy and downhill skiing.
Dr. Ruxana Jina (Vital Strategies) is the Director of the Data Impact team in Vital Strategies. She has worked for over 20 years in government, academia and non-government sectors. Ruxana’s experience is in strengthening health information and surveillance systems to advance policy. She also has an interest in women’s health, specifically gender-based violence and health. In Vital Strategies, she leads a team that collaborates with government ministries in approximately 20 countries, enhancing the use of public health data to inform policy development and decision-making. Prior to her position in Vital, she headed the epidemiology unit at the National Institute for Occupational Health in South Africa and worked in management at Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital and the Auditor General South Africa. Ruxana is a public health physician with an MS in Epidemiology and a PhD in Public Health.
Jeni Stockman (Pendulum) is a senior deployment manager at Pendulum, where she leads a team of machine-learning scientists and software engineers in the application of machine learning to global development projects. Jeni is a global development expert with a career that spans national health, defense, and information technology industries. She has spent over a decade deploying strategic innovations to varying political and social environments across industries to ensure service delivery is efficient, effective, and accepted. She brings a broad perspective on human behavior and experience to her work, and challenges the status quo to adapt where possible and to change meaningfully where inevitable. Her wide interests have helped her develop deep technical and operational knowledge across whole systems.
Dr. George Ochieng Otieno (GEMNet Health) is the GEMNet Team Lead for CHISU. Dr. Otieno is a senior lecturer in the School of Public Health and Applied Human Sciences, Kenyatta University. Dr. Otieno is the coordinator of IMPACT Project – a capacity building program in collaboration with Ministry of Health (K) and CDC, Atlanta. Otieno teaches and supervises undergraduate and postgraduate students in health informatics, monitoring and evaluation, research methods, biostatistics and health systems’ management. Dr. Otieno has published widely in the area of health informatics and has a great interest in quality improvement initiatives through development of informatics tools to improve healthcare delivery and patient safety. His research interest also revolves around monitoring and evaluation of healthcare interventions, and health systems strengthening through use of technology. Dr. Otieno holds PhD in health informatics from the International University of Health and Welfare, Japan.
Dr. Chris Seebregts (Jembi) is the Jembi Team Lead for CHISU. The founder and Chief Executive of Jembi Health Systems, Dr. Seebregts is a digital health professional with expertise in biomedical research, computer science, and information systems. He established the Biomedical Informatics Research Division at the South African Medical Research Council (MRC). In 2005, he spun off Jembi as a separate organization. Dr. Seebregts leads the MRC-Jembi Collaborating Centre for Digital Health Innovation. He holds a Ph.D. in medical biochemistry from the University of Cape Town, South Africa and is an Honorary Research Associate in the School of Public Health and Family Medicine at the University of Cape Town.