After graduating from UC Berkeley in 2011, Stephanie went on to pursue a Master’s degree at SDA Bocconi School of Management in Milan, Italy. Her degree was in International Healthcare Management, Economics and Policy, with a specialization in Global Health and Development. In her final term, she had the opportunity to intern at the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) in New York. During her internship, she worked extensively with the malaria team, learning about seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) and the pilot study CHAI was launching in Nigeria to determine the most cost-effective and efficient strategy for scaling up and distributing the treatment. In addition, Stephanie also worked extensively with analyzing procurement data for rapid malaria diagnostic tests (RDTs) in order to contribute to the improved understanding of the public sector markets by producing significant conclusions from the analyses that can be leveraged to create favorable market conditions for malaria RDTs. Currently, Stephanie is exploring a different passion– working in social media marketing. Stephanie writes:
“Being part of the ISF department during my undergrad years was a great learning experience as it gave me the freedom to choose my own courses and develop my own concentration. For this reason, I developed critical thinking skills and a natural sense of curiosity, while cultivating diverse forms knowledge and perspectives that I could later on apply to any context I was in.”
Stephanie provides this abstract for her thesis “The Role and Impact of Technology on Health and Illness: Overutilization of Technology in the U.S. Healthcare System in a Comparative Context”:
“In a world of increasingly technology-permeated societies, a transformation is taking place as roles and relationships are changed and redefined with the emergence of innovations in all aspects of our lives. In particular, the development of health technologies has created new relationships and interactions between technology and health that have had significant impact on the health sector. Through a comparative analysis between the United States and other OECD countries, I focused on the phenomenon of technology overutilization in healthcare and its impact on health and healthcare costs. In conclusion, health technologies have and can significantly contribute to the health sector; however, the excessive utilization of technology can also be highly problematic. Therefore, it is important to achieve an appropriate balance of the use of health technologies so that healthcare systems, and their associated agents, can provide the best quality care possible while maintaining health expenditures at a reasonable and affordable level.”
