Dr. German Henostroza
Born in Peru, Dr. Henostroza did his internal medicine residency at Illinois Masonic Medical Center. Upon finishing residency, he was offered a position back in Peru to lead an initiative under the sponsorship of WHO/TDR and Find Diagnostics to evaluate novel TB diagnostic trials, he established the TB Research unit at the tropical medicine institute Alexander Von Humboldt, UPCH. After this experience he continued his training in Infectious Diseases Fellowship at UAB. Upon completing his fellowship, he joined the ID faculty at UAB in 2008 and moved with his family to live and work in Zambia within the Center for Infectious Diseases Research in Zambia (CIDRZ), where he implemented research with emphasis on TB-HIV co-infection and malaria. In 2011 he was appointed Director of the UAB-Zambia Tuberculosis Research Initiative. After 7 years working overseas he relocated back to Birmingham in 2015 to continue his international work now based in Birmingham. Due to his work and knowledge, he serves as member of the TB diagnostic Working Group (WHO), the Prisons Working Group (IUATLD) and is a TB Advisory board member for the State of Alabama. Since 2015, he has served as the UAB director of the Gorgas Course in Clinical Tropical Medicine. He also oversees the Gorgas Scholarship Award, which supports international patient care and clinical experience for UAB medical students and residents.
In 2022, he became Co – Director of the UAB Gorgas Global Health Fellowship.
Dr. Jill Neely
Dr. Neely was born and raised in Managua, Nicaragua. She completed her undergraduate degree at Jefferson State Community College and Samford University, where she graduated Summa Cum Laude and subsequently received a scholarship to the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, where she received the prestigious George and Barbara Burrows Award for her efforts in medical missions. She then completed her residency in Internal Medicine with a Global Health emphasis at UAB. During her residency, she was awarded a scholarship to the prestigious Gorgas Institute for Tropical Medicine in Peru. She is passionate about preventive and tropical medicine, education through social media, and mentoring medical students and residents. Dr. Jill Aragon Neely is an internal and tropical medicine physician who is the founder and co-director of the UAB Gorgas Global Health Fellowship at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Medical Center, where she also works as a hospitalist. Dr. Neely is one of the youngest physicians at UAB to have been appointed the role of fellowship director. She is also the director of the CHOSEN Eye Hospital in Nicaragua, a non-profit hospital that provides free cataract and retina surgeries to the most vulnerable populations in Nicaragua.
Dr. Gretchen Carpintero-Ramirez
After graduating high school in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where she was born and raised, Dr. Carpintero-Ramirez attended The George Washington University. She graduated from GW in 2004 with a major in chemistry and a minor in biology. Soon thereafter, she joined the Smithsonian Institute as a laboratory technician where she studied evolution alongside some of her heroes. She then received a masters in biotechnology from Johns Hopkins University. From there Dr. Carpintero-Ramirez joined The National Cancer Institute at the National Institute of Health (NCI at NIH) to conduct cancer research. After four years at NIH, she joined MSF (Doctors Without Borders) as a laboratory manager where she found a passion for medicine and global health. Later, she returned to NIH to continue doing cancer research, but this time in the National Human Genome Research Institute. After four years, Dr. Carpintero Ramirez decided to study medicine at RUSM specializing in Internal Medicine at Stony Brook in New York. During her time in residency she joined Harvard’s Partners in Health program as a physician mentor in Chiapas, Mexico. After residency, she joined the UAB Gorgas Global Health Fellowship, a decision she maintains was one of the best in her life. Upon graduation, she joined UAB Hospital Medicine as a hospitalist and currently also serves as faculty for the Global Health Fellowship.
Dr. Ginger Holton
Dr. Holton first fell in love with global health while working as a community health educator in rural Mozambique where she lived with her husband and children almost 9 years. After returning to the U.S., she attended medical school at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and then residency at Yale University where she trained as a Med-Peds physician. She was thrilled when she discovered that UAB had a phenomenal global health fellowship where she could get additional training in tropical medicine and global health. She never expected that she would end up settling in Alabama, but she fell in love with the program and after completing her training, joined the faculty where she works as an adult hospitalist and as an urgent care physician in the Children’s of Alabama Emergency Department. As faculty, she enjoys working with fellows and traveling overseas to work in international hospitals and clinics whenever she can.
Dr. Laia Vazquez
Dr. Laia J Vazquez Guillamet (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2649-3910) graduated from medical school at the University of Granada, Spain, in 2014, after having completed a one year Erasmus stay at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom, a one year Sicue-Seneca stay at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain, and a Gynecology rotation in León, Mexico. Dr. Vazquez moved to the United States in 2015 to pursue medical specialization. She completed her internal medicine residency at Yale New Haven Bridgeport Hospital in 2018, obtaining the Raymond Haddad Award for Outstanding Professionalism, and her fellowship in infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) in 2020. That same year, she completed the Gorgas Course in Tropical Medicine in Lima, Peru, which allowed her to obtain the CTropMed Certificate in November of 2020. Dr Vazquez returned to her home country, Spain at the end of her fellowship after having obtained a prestigious scholarship to pursue her doctoral studies in Medicine and Translational Research at the University of Barcelona and the Barcelona Institute for Global Health. Her doctoral studies focus on the prevention of infectious diseases among hard-to-reach and vulnerable populations, with a special focus on the usage and implementation of pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV. During her medical training, Dr. Vazquez has also been involved in research activities in Panamá (2018), Cameroon (2019), and Mozambique (2021). Outside her academic work and clinical training, Dr. Vazquez is cofounder of Women in Global Health Spain, an NGO that launched in 2022 and led the strategic design work group for two years (2021 to 2023). She has been an active member (2020 to 2022) and coordinator (2022 to 2023) of the Student and Trainee Leadership Group of the American Society of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her previous excellent experience at UAB drove her to join the faculty of Hospital Medicine and its Global Health Fellowship in 2023.
