Contributor Biographies
Drishti Sharma, MD, is a Senior Manager in Health Systems and Policy Research, in IAVI-New Delhi (International AIDS Vaccine Initiative). Her primary interest lies in the social and behavioral aspect of health, especially of children and adolescents. She has developed and tested a culturally adapted life skills intervention to prevent in-person bullying among middle-school children in India. Her work in bullying prevention in India was selected for the American Psychosomatic Society’s Cousins Center’s Global Outreach Award.
Krista Mehari, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at University of South Alabama and a licensed clinical psychologist. She has expertise in cyberbullying and violence prevention, and has received funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for her work. She has published over 30 peer-reviewed articles and chapters on these topics, including a chapter in a book published by Cambridge UP (Cambridge Handbook of Violent Behavior and Aggression, 2nd Ed).
Jennifer L. Doty, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Youth Development and Prevention Science in the Department of Family, Youth, and Community Sciences at the University of Florida. She received her doctorate from the University of Minnesota in Family Social Science with an emphasis on prevention. With over 30 scholarly publications, her research interests are built around the idea that parent-child relationships and technology are key leverage points for improving adolescent health and well-being. She also leads the Cyberbullying Prevention Collaborative.
Pamela Wisniewski, PhD, is an Associate Professor in Human-Computer Interaction in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida. Her work lies at the intersection of Social Computing and Privacy. She is an expert in the interplay between social media, privacy, and online safety for adolescents. She has authored over 80 peer-reviewed publications and has won multiple best papers (top 1%) and best paper honorable mentions (top 5%) at ACM SIGCHI (Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer–Human Interaction) conferences. She has been awarded $3 million in external grant funding, and her research has been featured by popular news media outlets, including ABC News, NPR, Psychology Today, and U.S. News and World Report. She was an inaugural member of the ACM Future Computing Academy, is an ACM Senior Member, and the first and only computer scientist to ever be selected as a William T. Grant Scholar.
Nandini Sharma, MD, is Director Professor of Community Medicine at Maulana Azad Medical College, Delhi, India. She has previously served as the Dean of Maulana Azad Medical College and Head of Department of Community Medicine at Maulana Azad Medical College. She is on multiple Federal government advisory committees in India, including the Chairperson of the Delhi task force for Revised National Tuberculosis Control Program, Chairperson of the Data Safety Monitoring Board constituted for the studies conducted on prevention of Corona by Directorate of AYUSH (Homoeopathic Wing), and chairperson of two institutional ethics committees. She has over 125 publications in peer-reviewed journals, with topics heavily focused on health promotion and disease management and containment.
Mona Duggal, MPH, MD, is an Assistant Professor of Community Medicine at Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education Research (PGIMER) Chandigarh, and has an Adjunct Professor position at Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi, India. Dr. Duggal received her MPH from Johns Hopkins and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Medical Informatics from Yale University. She has worked as a member of several international transdisciplinary research teams in areas of intersection of behavioral science, technology, and clinical intervention research among vulnerable populations, leading to about 40 publications focused on community health promotion.
Natasha Basu, M.A., is a Ph.D. Candidate in Clinical-Counseling Psychology at the University of South Alabama. Her research interests are broadly in the area of suicide prevention, with a particular focus on barriers to mental health treatment and increasing help-seeking behaviors among marginalized persons and members of minority groups.
Anthony Pinter, M.S., M.S., is a Ph.D. Candidate in Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research focuses on understanding how social media complicates life transitions like relationship dissolution or gender transition.
Arup Kumar Ghosh, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Mathematical, Computing, and Information Sciences at Jacksonville State University. He is presently serving as the Secretary for the IEEE Alabama Section (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). He has expertise in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Formal Methods, Cybersecurity, and Data Science. He has published several peer-reviewed journal and conference papers, including multiple first-author papers at Association for Computing Machinery’s premier conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. His research work was placed in University of Central Florida’s top 10 research findings of 2018 and has been highlighted by ABC News, Business Standard, Science Daily, and NPR.
Karla Girón, M.S., (she/her) is a Research Coordinator for the Precision Medicine Program at the University of Florida. She received a master’s degree in Family, Youth and Community Sciences from the University of Florida. Her research interests involve equity in public health, improvement of mental health services and their accessibility, and positive youth development. Her ultimate goal is to help bridge the gap in communication between researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, to encourage interdisciplinary research and implementation, and to help advance the field of translational science.
Ritika Bakshi, MD, is a Senior Resident at Department of Community Medicine in Maulana Azad Medical College (MAMC), New Delhi. She completed her MBBS and MD in Preventive and Social Medicine from Government Medical College, Amritsar affiliated to Baba Farid University of Health Sciences, Faridkot, Punjab, India. She has five articles published in journals and has presented in national and regional conferences. She has been a co-investigator in various projects in MAMC and also participated in various rounds of Delhi Serosurvey for COVID-19.
