Heather Fosburgh

2014 EMERGING VOICE AWARD RECIPIENT

BA 1995, Brian Lamb School of Communication

Program Manager, Global Health Leadership Institute, Yale University
New Haven, CT

Upon graduating from Purdue University, Heather served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Dominican Republic where she discovered her passion for international development. After the Peace Corps, she received her M.S. in Political Science and Applied Community and Economic Development from Illinois State University. Heather spent nearly five years working in community development in the state of Illinois before returning to global work with The Rotary Foundation of Rotary International. Ms. Fosburgh spent seven years working at The Rotary Foundation in various roles, eventually managing grant compliance. In 2011 she left her successful career to pursue her Masters in Public Health at Yale University. Heather’s primary research focus was devoted to health systems strengthening in low-income countries. She graduated from Yale with her MPH and for the last year, and is currently a program manager at the Yale Global Health Leadership Institute working on projects throughout the world to support capacity building in the healthcare workforce as well structural support to increase access to health care. She has contributed to projects to target high transmission areas for HIV/AIDS and the implementation of national health insurance in South Africa; to provide leadership, governance and management training with the Ministry of Health in Ethiopia; and to implement an intervention looking at how organizational culture can improve outcomes for heart attack patients in U.S. hospitals.