Public Health Alumnus Earns Elite AIDS Relief Fellowship

Joseph Konstanzer, a graduate of UNC Charlotte’s dual master’s program in public health and health informatics, has been named a public health fellow at Public Health Institute (PHI)/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), working out of the Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator and Health Diplomacy. The office is responsible for implementing the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the world’s largest public health program designed to combat a single disease.

“My role will be to assist in ensuring data-driven decision making at both the general level and individual country level,” said Kostanzer, who graduated in May of 2018. “I will support a wide array of data collection, compilation, and analysis work, using multiple types of data (programmatic, survey, financial, etc.). In addition, I will serve as a technical resource to a PEPFAR country team and provide a link between them and the national office.”

The PHI/CDC Global Health Fellowship Program helps promising emerging global public health professionals to develop technical skills needed to respond to today’s public health needs and challenges with an emphasis in the areas of epidemiology, HIV prevention, monitoring and evaluation (M&E), strategic information, program management, and surveillance.

“Joe’s combined training in community health practice and health analytics provides him a thorough grounding in the theory, methods, and skills necessary to conceptualize, measure, analyze, and visually present data to support meaningful, evidence-driven, culturally appropriate alternatives to address vexing problems such as HIV/AIDS,” said Dr. Michael Thompson, director of the Health Informatics and Analytics Program.

Master of Public Health program director Dr. Jan Warren-Findlow added, “Joe’s experience in bridging public health and health informatics helped demonstrate the need for an MPH concentration in population health analytics, a new offering beginning this fall that will complement the dual program Joe followed.”

Konstanzer said his training in visually representing data will be particularly valuable moving forward.

“[It] provides an opportunity to cut through the statistical jargon and engage laypeople and non-research oriented healthcare professionals in the data conversation, a critical need I saw while serving as an AmeriCorps volunteer.”

UNC Charlotte is North Carolina’s urban research university. The MPH Program is one of the several CEPH-accredited public health programs within the UNC Charlotte College of Health and Human Services’ Department of Public Health Sciences, an aspiring School of Public Health. The MS in Health Informatics is an interdisciplinary program jointly offered by the College of Health and Human Services and the College of Computing and Informatics within the framework of UNC Charlotte’s Data Science Initiative (DSI). The dual MPH/MS health informatics and analytics program allows students to earn both degrees concurrently while