Students

Kayla Saadeh earned her BA in Political Science at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, followed by her Master of Public Health in Epidemiology from The George Washington University, and she is currently an Epidemiology student in the Joint Doctoral Program in Public Health at SDSU and UCSD. She has spent the last decade working at various levels of government public health agencies, including working on COVID at the Orange County Healthcare Agency, and on HPV and mpox in the Office of STIs and HCV at the California Department of Public Health. Kayla’s research interests are in social and structural barriers to sexual health prevention, and particularly the HPV vaccine and cervical cancer screening. In Dr. Goldenberg’s lab, Kayla has participated in a variety of analyses and data management activities related to the AESHA and Mom Power projects.

Emma Stirling-Cameron is a PhD candidate and Killam Fellow in the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia. Emma’s dissertation work is nested within the Maternal and Infant Health Among Refugee and Asylum-Seeking Women (MIHRA) Project, led by Dr. Shira Goldenberg at San Diego State University. Her dissertation is examining the impact that the criminalization of migration (e.g., militarized borders, immigration detention, deterrence-based immigration policy) is having on the sexual and reproductive health of refugee and asylum-seeking women and their children.

Her work is funded by the Canadian Institute for Health Research. Emma’s other work is centred around reproductive justice and access to healthcare, particularly perinatal and abortion care, for populations who have been marginalized, including migrants, people of African descent, and 2SLGBTQIA+ folks. Emma is also a Research Fellow with the Centre for Migration Studies at UBC and a part-time lecturer at the Bern University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland. She is a member of the #WelcometoCanada consortium, which is an advocacy organization, led by Amnesty International, seeking to end immigration detention in Canada.

Kirstin Kielhold has a wide range of public health interests and is currently working on her dissertation focused on stigma and discrimination among marginalized women and Black sexual minority men living with HIV who use drugs. Her work explores how structural level factors such as criminalization impact the health outcomes of traditionally marginalized communities. She has a MS in Global Health from UC San Francisco and her BA in Psychology from UC Berkeley. Kirstin’s interest in substance use started while working at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the California Department of Public Health doing harm reduction centered work at syringe exchange sites.

Nadia Hemmat is a second-year PhD student in the Joint Doctoral Program in Public Health (Global Health track) at UC San Diego and San Diego State University. Her research focuses on migration, violence through the migration process, menstrual health, and food security among Latine and Indigenous populations. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Human Biology from Stanford University and her master’s degree in Global Health Sciences at University of California San Francisco. Nadia is currently supported by the T32 ALIADOS Fellowship through the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMH) and is a recipient of the University Graduate Fellowship at San Diego State University.