Alisha Graves, MPH

Alisha Graves is Executive Director of OASIS and a Founder of the OASIS Initiative at University of California, Berkeley. Alisha lectures internationally on population and food security in the Sahel. She is a research fellow for Project Drawdown, analyzing the potential contribution of family planning for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Previously, she worked to improve women's access to misoprostol, a generic, essential medicine. In this role, she worked on drug registration, operations research, and advocating for evidence-based maternal health policies across seven countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. She completed her MPH in International Maternal and Child Health at UC Berkeley in 2006. 

Natalie Williams, MPH

Natalie Williams is Deputy Director of OASIS. Natalie is a public health professional with over seventeen years of senior management experience in international health policy and program development in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Before joining OASIS, she worked for a variety of international agencies and was responsible for managing complex maternal health and Indigenous mental health programs, including access to high-impact maternal health interventions, strengthening health systems for family planning and reproductive health services and behavioral change for Indigenous suicide prevention. Natalie is a return Peace Corps Volunteer and Masters International Scholar dedicated to connecting underserved populations to resources that can improve their quality of life. She received her MPH from George Washington University with a concentration in Global Health Promotion.

Malcolm Potts, MB, BChir, PhD, FRCOG

Malcolm Potts is a Founder of the OASIS Initiative and Professor Emeritus at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the first holder of the Fred H. Bixby endowed chair in Population and Family Planning and founded the Bixby Center for Population, Health & Sustainability with a team of young experts. He is Co-Director of the Berkeley International Group (BIG) with Dr. Julia Walsh. While he was the first Medical Director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation for a decade, he introduced family planning methods into scores of developing countries. As CEO of Family Health International (FHI), he launched the first large scale studies of maternal mortality, which helped start the worldwide Safe Motherhood Initiative. He has published ten books and over 200 scientific papers. His most recent book is Sex and War: How Biology Explains War and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World. 

Abdoul Moumouni Nouhou, PhD

Abdoul Moumouni Nouhou is a demographer-statistician, Director of L’Initiative OASIS Niger and Affiliated Researcher with OASIS. After working at the National Institute of Statistics in Niger, he joined the World Food Program where for four years he conducted monitoring and evaluation of health / nutrition, rural development and school feeding programs. Nouhou is actively involved in innovative work on demographic issues in West Africa. His PhD research focuses on the links between empowerment of women and fertility projections, including the use of contraception. Mr. Nouhou firmly believes in the potential of women to contribute to the welfare of families and the need for African countries to unlock this potential to accelerate their economic and social development.

Robert (Nap) Hosang, MD, MPH, MBA, FRCOG, FACOG

Robert (Nap) Hosang is Director of the Over-the-Counter Birth Control Pill project. Nap has more than 20 years of experience advising many national governments on the design of maternity health services to reduce maternal mortality and improve birth outcomes. A practicing obstetrician/gynecologist and public health specialist for 30 years, he cared for more than 3,000 pregnant women from their first trimester through delivery and the reproductive health management for many more. Nap retired from active clinical practice in 2010 and is now working on making it possible for American women to have a safe and affordable over-the-counter birth control pill option that does not require a prescription. Nap is also the 2016 recipient of the APHA Carl S. Shultz award for lifetime achievement in Population, Reproduction and Sexual Health.

Paige Passano, MPH

Paige Passano is the Technical Advisor for the Sahel Leadership Program. She is a researcher at the Bixby Center for Population, Health & Sustainability with expertise in global maternal health, adolescent girls’ education and capacity building. In 2013, she joined The OASIS Initiative, contributing to program design and development, partnership building and fundraising. After completing her MPH in International Public Health from the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, she was a project manager for Population Services International (PSI) in Mumbai, India for 4 years. She has been with the Bixby Center since 2007, working to reduce maternal mortality in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and northern Nigeria. 

Daniel Perlman

Daniel Perlman is a research medical anthropologist at UC Berkeley with more than twenty years’ experience implementing and evaluating community-based health and education programs in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. He leads OASIS’ girls education and empowerment programming. Perlman co-founded the Population and Reproductive Health Initiative in partnership with Ahmadu Bello University and then the Centre for Girls education in Zaria, Nigeria. He served as the Centre's first director until 2016 and as the PI on the Centre’s research and evaluation grants from the MacArthur Foundation, Intel Foundation, UNFPA, Ford Foundation, and the Packard Foundation.

Allyson Fritz

Allyson Fritz is Girls Education & Empowerment Technical Advisor. She brings experience in organizational system’s building, program evaluation, and fundraising. She has worked for Tostan in Senegal supporting the M&E, Communications and Grants teams, primarily focusing on Tostan’s efforts to promote the abandonment of Female Genital Cutting. She is passionate about youth education and livelihoods opportunities, and has worked on program evaluations for Uganda Youth Development Link in Kampala and locally with Marin County Probation. Allyson completed her MSW from UC Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare in 2016 with a concentration in Management and Planning.

Morgan DeLuce

Morgan DeLuce is the Program & Development Manager. She brings experience in operations, donor cultivation, and partnership building. She previously worked with Mama Hope in rural Kenya to fund human resource development and create monitoring tools to better understand partners’ impact on the education and economy of the community. While in San Francisco, she worked in operations and partnership building for a small crowdfunding nonprofit. She is passionate about gender equity and community centered development. Morgan received a BA in Sociology from Boston College with a concentration in management and leadership.

Elizabeth Desser, MS

Elizabeth Desser joined OASIS in 2021 and contributes to programs that seek to develop and facilitate girls’ education and women’s empowerment in Maradi, Niger. During the 1990s she served as an agroforestry Peace Corps Volunteer in the Central African Republic and Mauritania, later returning as an agroforestry technical trainer for Peace Corps Senegal and Mauritania. She is currently a PhD student in Education at the Margaret Warner School of Education & Human Development/University of Rochester and received her MS in Geosciences from Penn State University, a BS in Geosciences from the University of Arizona, and a BA in Public Administration from the University of Oklahoma. She brings seven years of diverse teaching and training experiences to the role and is dedicated to efforts that advance and strengthen equitable and sustainable education in the Sahel.

Ndola Prata, MD, MSc

Ndola Prata is a public health physician and medical demographer from Angola. She earned her medical degree from the University of Angola and an MSc in medical demography from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She began her career practicing medicine in Angola for 10 years and served as Head of the Social Statistics Department at the National Institute of Statistics of Angola. Shortly after moving to the US, while beginning her tenure as a researcher and lecturer at UC Berkeley, she served as a Demographer/Analyst for CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health for six years, a role she resumed briefly from 2010 to 2011. Prata’s current research is based in sub-Saharan Africa, she is especially interested in family planning, abortion, reproductive health, women’s health and empowerment and maternal mortality. 

Marie-Audrey Sonzia Teutsong, PhD

Sonzia Teutsong Marie-Audrey is a demographer. After working for three years at the Ministry of Economy and Planning in Cameroon, where she notably contributed to the strategic document "Cameroon Vision 2035", she did her thesis at the Sorbonne and taught demography and quantitative methods in various french universities. In 2017, she joined the team of the Laboratory for Studies and Research in Sociology (LABERS) in Bretagne where she teaches and participates in numerous projects, in particular on violence against women. Sonzia actively participates in work on women's autonomy, gender relations and the role of men, which is often overlooked, in maintaining relatively high fertility in sub-Saharan Africa. Sonzia firmly believes in the education of girls and women, their financial autonomy and their free choice, of decision-making (in fertility, family planning and marriage) as accelerating factors of economic and social development of the region and as factors of demographic transition.

Amy Grossman 

Amy Grossman is a Reproductive Health Medicines Specialist and works on our Medication Abortion program. Amy is a registered nurse and holds a Masters in Public Health with a specialty in maternal and child health and international health from the University of California, Berkeley. Amy held a variety of roles from monitoring and evaluation, communications and technical advising during her seven-year tenure at Venture Strategies Innovations, a US-based organization that pioneered the introduction of misoprostol for multiple obstetric indications in over 20 countries. She has co-authored and published training materials on the use of misoprostol for various indications including mifepristone and misoprostol for medical abortion and the community-level use of misoprostol for postpartum hemorrhage treatment and prevention in peer-reviewed journals.

Sarah Jones

Sarah Jones is a Reproductive Health Medicines Specialist and works on our Medication Abortion program. Sarah holds a Masters in International Relations. Previously, Sarah was a Senior Program Manager at Venture Strategies Innovations, a US-based organization that pioneered the introduction of misoprostol for multiple obstetric indications in over 20 countries. In this role, she helped to facilitate registration of misoprostol in Niger, Burkina Faso and Burundi and a mife/miso product in Burundi and inclusion of those medicines in the national essential medicines list. She has co-authored and published training materials on the use of misoprostol for various indications including mifepristone and misoprostol for medical abortion. 

Brooke Escobar

Brooke Escobar is a development finance researcher with expertise in aid analysis on traditional and non-traditional donor flows. She is working with OASIS to better understand development finance flows to the Sahel region and their role in better empowering women through family planning and education services. Brooke currently serves as a Senior Program and Technology Manager at AidData, a research development lab based at the College of William & Mary. She leads AidData’s Transparent Development Finance data collection team. Brooke holds an MA in Public Affairs from the University of Texas in Austin and a BA in Political Science from Brigham Young University.

Karen Pak Oppenheimer, MS, MPH, Pandefense Advisory, Chair

Karen works as a thought partner for global impact organizations, and has expertise in business development, and implementation of technology-enabled healthcare delivery services. She is an experienced healthcare entrepreneur, who spent nearly a decade at the World Health Partners, a global non-profit that uses technology and market-based approaches to bring healthcare within walkable distance in India and East Africa. Prior to joining WHP, she served in multiple roles at public as well as private sector organizations, including the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oracle Corporation, and the United Nations Population Fund in China. Karen holds a Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering from Johns Hopkins University, a Master of Science in biotechnology from Northwestern University, and Master of Public Health from the University of California, Berkeley.

Sarah Jane Holcombe, PhD, MPH, MPPM, The Challenge Initiative, Secretary

Dr. Sarah Jane Holcombe is a Senior Learning Advisor at The Challenge Initiative, Gates Institute, Johns Hopkins University. She comes to TCI from the Bixby Center at the University of California, Berkeley, where she developed IRB protocols, survey and focus group instruments, and the design and running of capacity-building workshops. She has experience at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as a Program Officer for the David and Lucile Packard Foundation’s Family Planning & Reproductive Health Program and the Erik E. and Edith H. Bergstrom Foundation. Sarah Jane has an MPH from the School of Public Health, and a Masters in Public and Private Management from the School of Management, at Yale University. She received her Ph.D. in Health Services & Policy Analysis from the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation explored three facets of Ethiopia’s 2005 reform of its Penal Code with respect to abortion: the factors underlying this reform (agenda-setting processes), the roles of obstetrician-gynecologists in advancing reform; and the attitudes of midwives toward implementing the reform through service provision.

Fadji Maina, PhD, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Fadji Zaouna Maina is a computational hydrologist, working as an Earth scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. She was previously working in the field of hydrogeology at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where she used computational model using supercomputers to study the effects of climate change on water sustainability and predict future needs. Her research has demonstrated that wildfire in California counterintuitively increase the water availability in the watersheds, as the barren lands impact the snowpack dynamics. She also studies the potential effects of drought in African Sahel region, advocating for a holistic response including girl education and family planning, increase in agricultural production and local security.

Margot Fahnestock, MPP, Medicines360, Treasurer

Margot currently serves as the Vice President of Strategic Development at Medicines360. Before Medicines360, Margot served as a Program Officer in the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Global Development and Population Program. Margot was also a founding member and catalyst for the Ouagadougou Partnership, which has mobilized more than $200 million in additional funding for family planning in Francophone West Africa since 2012. She also led an effort with the Hewlett Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Children’s Investment Fund Foundation to use human-centered design to strengthen adolescent reproductive health services. Prior to Hewlett, Margot managed West Africa field operations for a USAID-funded health policy initiative at the Futures Group (now Palladium). After graduating from the University of California, Los Angeles with a bachelor’s degree in English literature, Margot spent two years as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in a rural town in Mali. Margot also has a master’s degree in public policy from the University of Chicago.

Robert Gillespie, MPH, Population Communication

Robert W. Gillespie, MPH is president of Population Communication in Pasadena, California, and the author of “Statement on Population Stabilization,” which has been signed by seventy-five world leaders. In the 1960s and 1970s, he did groundbreaking work in Taiwan, Iran, and Bangladesh. Gillespie has worked for the Pathfinder Fund, Population Crisis Committee, and Population Council, and is also a filmmaker (No Vacancy, 2004).

Malcolm Potts, MD, PhD, FRCOG, UC Berkeley, Vice Chair

Matt Matusiewicz

Matt is a sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley as a Chancellor's Scholar in biomedical engineering, with interests in public health and Francophone diaspora studies. As a native speaker of French, he performs translation work and acts as a research assistant with OASIS.

Natalya Foreman

Natalya is a junior at UC Berkeley studying Integrative Human Biology with a minor in French. She is passionate about public health and working in underserved medicine. Her role at OASIS involves assisting in coordinating outreach through the website, newsletter, and other administrative tasks. 

Frederique Sauve

Frederique is pursuing a Masters of Public Health with an emphasis in Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology at UC Berkeley. She completed her B.Sc in Pharmacology and Therapeutics at McGill University. After graduating, she worked for the University of Montreal School of Public Health under the supervision of Mira Johri where she studied interventions to increase access to childhood vaccination in rural India. At UC Berkeley, Frederique teaches two introductory neuroscience courses, "Drugs and the Brain" and "Brain, Mind and Behavior", as a graduate student instructor. She hopes to pursue a career in teaching at the university level and in research, contributing to improving global health and women's rights in underserved countries.