Congratulations to the recipients of the Spring 2025 UCSF Resource Allocation Program (RAP) pilot awards funded by the Institute for Global Health Sciences: Lucía Abascal Miguel, Christine Blauvelt, Calvin Chiu, Nadia Diamond-Smith, Anneka Hooft and Mary Jue Xu.
IGHS is pleased to invest $275,000 to support the global health research of six investigators. Each awardee will receive $50,000 through the “Mentored Scientist Award in Global Health” mechanism. Three awards were co-funded this year, one by the UCSF Center for Global Infectious and Parasitic Diseases Malaria Elimination Initiative, and two by the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, Global Cancer Program (noted below).
Recipient Bios
Lucía Abascal Miguel, MD, MSc, PhD
IGHS-funded
Abascal Miguel is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and IGHS. She is a physician and public health researcher focused on advancing health equity through implementation science and digital health innovation. Her work centers on designing and evaluating culturally tailored, scalable interventions—such as WhatsApp-based chatbots and social media campaigns—to improve vaccination, family planning and preventive health among Spanish-speaking and Indigenous populations in the U.S. and Latin America.
Abascal Miguel has led and co-led multiple mixed-methods studies in Guatemala, Mexico, and California, often in partnership with Ministries of Health and community organizations. She serves as a public health spokesperson for the California Department of Public Health, where she leads Spanish-language risk communication strategies, including recent efforts on H5N1. Her research combines social network analysis, human-centered design and participatory approaches to address misinformation and strengthen trust in health systems. She earned her MD in Mexico and her PhD and MS at IGHS.
Christine Blauvelt, MD
Co-funded by IGHS and Center for Global Infectious and Parasitic Diseases (Malaria Elimination Initiative)
Blauvelt is a maternal-fetal medicine fellow at UCSF. She graduated from the UPenn Perelman School of Medicine and completed her residency training in OB/GYN at UCSF. Her research and clinical interests include pregnancy-associated infections, sepsis, prediction and prevention of preterm birth, and quality improvement. Her research work within the Gaw Lab is focused on systemic and placental immune responses to infections in pregnancy. Blauvelt is studying the impact of antepartum infections on placental function, pregnancy outcomes and the neonatal immune system.
Calvin Chiu, PhD
Co-funded with IGHS and Global Cancer
Chiu is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Health & Aging, University of California San Francisco. His research is at the intersection of behavioral, development and health economics, focusing on innovative ways to increase uptake of healthcare services in low- and middle-income countries. Previously, he worked for Innovations for Poverty Action in Zambia and the Health Economics and Epidemiology Research Office in South Africa on research in maternal and child health and HIV respectively. He holds a PhD in Health Policy (Health Economics) from the University of California, Berkeley and an MA in Economics from Boston University.
Nadia Diamond-Smith, PhD, MS
IGHS-funded
Diamond-Smith is an Associate Professor in the Epidemiology and Biostatistics Department and IGHS. Her expertise is in maternal and reproductive health in the developing world, with a focus on gender inequality/women’s empowerment, family planning and abortion, nutrition, and the preconception, pregnancy and postpartum periods. She is a public health demographer, and did her dissertation research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health on trends and causes of son preference and uneven child sex ratios in India. Much of her research is in South Asia, although she also works in Africa, elsewhere in Asia, in the U.S. and Latin America. Diamond-Smith uses mixed method approaches to research, intervention development and evaluation.
She currently is working on three studies in India: a group life skills and reproductive health empowerment intervention for newly married women on their ability to avoid unintended pregnancy; a study on women’s migration to their natal homes in pregnancy and its impact on healthcare use and outcomes; and a randomized control trial of a postpartum mhealth social support intervention. She has also been involved with a number of interventions using social media for data collection and interventions, including among indigenous populations in Guatemala and in California. She teaches courses in Demography; Research Ethics and Practice and Equity Issues in Reproductive Health at UCSF.
Anneka Hooft, MD
IGHS-funded
Hooft is a pediatric emergency medicine physician and researcher in global health and acute management of infectious diseases. Her research focuses on clinical decision-making during the care of sick children, especially those with undifferentiated febrile illness. She also studies related behavioral influences on both healthcare providers and caregivers of children in resource-limited settings and integration of informal medical providers (e.g., traditional healers) into the biomedical sphere utilizing epidemiological and implementation science techniques. Hooft’s goal is to improve access to care for those who need it most and optimize diagnosis and management of febrile illness through the use of evidence-based clinical guidelines and decision pathways.
Mary Jue Xu, MD
Co-funded by IGHS and Global Cancer
Xu is a head and neck oncology, endocrine, transoral robotic, and microvascular surgeon working at UCSF and the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. She works toward bettering the lives of cancer patients through direct patient care and through studying interventions to improve access to quality cancer care in resource-constrained health systems. She studied biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completed her medical degree in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program. During medical school, she spent a year at Butaro Cancer Center in Rwanda studying clinical outcomes of pediatric malignancies. During her otolaryngology-head and neck surgery residency at UCSF, she worked with Dr. Aslam Nkya, a head and neck surgeon in Tanzania, on projects assessing rates of human papillomavirus-associated head and neck cancers in Tanzania. She co-founded the Global Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery Initiative, an international research collaboration, and has worked on projects including a global otolaryngology-head and neck surgery workforce assessment. Xu’s ongoing research is focused on improving access to head and neck cancer care both domestically and internationally.
Banner photo – Top row, left-to-right: Lucía Abascal Miguel, Christine Blauvelt and Calvin Chiu. Bottom row, left-to-right: Nadia Diamond-Smith, Anneka Hooft and Mary Jue Xu.