While HMAP is a student run program, we work with an incredible team of graduate students that help keep the program running smoothly, as well as hosting workshops for our members on a variety of professional development topics. Meet our current team:
PH116 GSIs – Cheyenne Pritchard & Bobby Stahl
Cheyenne Pritchard
Hey there! My name is Cheyenne Pritchard (she/her) and I’m a second year in the Master’s in Public Health (MPH) program. My concentration is called Health and Social Behavior, and my core interests revolve around the intersection of food, climate, and health. I love solving wicked problems, and am studying how to use design thinking within the public health field. This summer, I worked for an ag-tech start-up called Beeflow as a Strategy Analyst and I learned all about sustainable pollination and the various challenges growers face in today’s climate. I received my Bachelor’s degree from Amherst College (Go Mammoths!) in 2016 with a double major in English and psychology. After graduating, I lived in Natal, Brazil completing a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship. My time abroad transformed my professional trajectory, and I pivoted from education to public health (though both fields are interrelated). Post Brazil, I spent three years at a large hunger-relief organization in Philadelphia leading their food rescue and food sourcing innovation work. More personally, I was born and raised in Iowa as the youngest of six kids. I love road trips, sunflowers, playing basketball, and live music.
Favorite ice cream flavor: Cookie dough
Favorite pet: Monte, my pupper!
Bobby Stahl
Hello! I’m a PhD student in the Sociocultural Anthropology program, as well as an alum of SPH (MPH HSB ’14). My dissertation research focuses on the various political and ethical entanglements through which ‘housing insecurity’ and its solutions come to be understood, shaped, and imagined. I’m especially interested in the lived experience of tenants and how their housing conditions configure so many of life’s possibilities (often in ways that escape articulation or are otherwise illegible within broader political discourses on housing). My research follows years working in and around the policy world, specifically in the East Bay, where I focused most of my efforts on understanding and interrupting the negative relationship between housing insecurity and poor health. I’m originally from the Texas-Mexico border but moved to the Bay in 2008. My partner -an HMAP alum and MPH grad- and I are raising our two young boys in Oakland, I love being a parent more than anything I’ve ever done, but I also don’t really remember what having “spare time” feels like.
HIS/FSI GSI – Kavya Nambiar
Hi everyone! My name is Kavya Nambiar and I am an upcoming second-year medical student at the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program and am planning on graduating with an MS/MD by 2026. I graduated from UC Berkeley in 2020, where I majored in Public Health and Molecular and Cell Biology, and minored in Human Rights. In my gap year, I worked as a Research Assistant for Dean Ashish Jha at Brown and a team at Harvard, where I researched health equity, the social determinants of health, and misinformation all in the context of COVID-19. As an undergraduate at Berkeley, I conducted research at the School of Law’s Human Rights Center and at the School of Social Welfare, worked as a Legislative Intern for Senator Dianne Feinstein, but most importantly was an FSI intern and an FSI TA for four semesters! FSI and HMAP were extremely meaningful to my professional and personal growth as a future physician, and I am so excited to GSI for the program this year! Outside of school, I enjoy traveling, going to the beach to collect rocks, curating Spotify playlists, and exploring the many coffeeshops the East Bay has to offer.
HMAP GSI
Larissa Benjamin
I’m a first year DrPH student in the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. My research interests center on the social and structural determinants of cardiovascular health, with particular curiosity for how history, policy, economics, and structural racism shape inequitable cardiovascular health outcomes in the rural south. I earned a BS in Evolutionary Anthropology and English from University of Michigan, and an MPH in Health and Social Behavior from UC Berkeley. For the previous 3 years, I worked on staff in the School of Public Health with two fantastic health equity focused Professors: Denise Herd and Mahasin Mujahid.