Incidence of Acute Myocardial Infarction in Northern Tanzania: A Modeling Approach Within a Prospective Observational Study.

Julian Hertz, MD, MSc, is an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine & Global Health. He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University and attended medical school at Duke University, where he received the Dean's Merit Scholarship and the Thomas Jefferson Award for leadership. He completed his residency training in emergency medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and his fellowship in Global Health at Duke.

Dr. Hertz's primary interests include global health, implementation science, and undergraduate and graduate medical education. Dr. Hertz's research focuses on using implementation science methods to improve cardiovascular care both locally and globally. His current projects involve developing interventions to improve acute myocardial infarction care in Tanzania, to improve management of hypertension among Tanzanians with HIV, and to improve post-hospital care among patients with multimorbidity in East Africa.

Dr. Hertz has received numerous awards for clinical, educational, and research excellence, including the Duke Emergency Medicine Faculty Teacher of the Year Award, the Duke Emergency Medicine Faculty Clinician of the Year Award, and the Duke Emergency Medicine Faculty Researcher of the Year Award. He has also received the Golden Apple Teaching Award from the Duke medical student body, the Duke Master Clinician/Teacher Award, and the Global Academic Achievement Award from the Society of Academic Emergency Medicine.

I am an infectious diseases doctor who specializes in the care of patients with general infectious diseases, including persons living with HIV. My research is focused on improving the diagnosis and treatment of infectious diseases among populations living in low-resource settings.

I am an Adjunct Professor of Medicine, Pathology, and Global Health. My work with Duke University is primarily based in northern Tanzania where I am former Site Leader and current Principal Investigator on projects linked to Duke University’s collaborative research program at Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre. I oversee the design and implementation of research studies on infectious diseases, particularly febrile illness, invasive bacterial disease, zoonotic infections, and infectious diseases diagnostics. In addition, I am Professor of Medicine, Pathology, and Global Health at the University of Otago and a medical epidemiologist with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). My CDC work focuses on non-malaria febrile illness.

Dr. Galson graduated from Mount Sinai School of Medicine and completed her residency in Emergency Medicine at the University of Arizona. She has always had a love for global health and has worked in India, Madagascar and Tanzania during her medical training. She completed the Global Health Emergency Medicine Fellowship in 2018.  
Dr. Galson's research is focused on non-communicable diseases in the emergency department and linkage to care in Moshi, Tanzania. She is interested in the intersection of public health and emergency care and hopes to promote the development of emergency medicine globally. Additionally, she loves to teach and instructs both residents and medical students in the classroom and clinically in the emergency department.  She joined Duke Emergency Medicine as faculty after the completion of her fellowship.

Gerald Bloomfield, MD, MPH, joined the faculty in Medicine and Global Health after completing his Cardiovascular Medicine fellowship training at Duke University Medical Center and Duke Clinical Research Institute. Bloomfield also completed the Duke Global Health Residency/Fellowship Pathway and a Fogarty International Clinical Research Fellowship. He received his medical education, internal medicine residency and Master of Public Health degree from Johns Hopkins University. Bloomfield leads a longstanding research and capacity building program on cardiovascular global health which includes work in under-resourced communities in the US and a number of low- and middle-income country settings.

Dr. Alexander T. Limkakeng, Jr., MD, MHSc, FACEP is a Professor of Emergency Medicine, Vice Chair of Clinical Research, Director of the Acute Care Research Team, and Director of the Resident Research Fellowship for the Department of Emergency Medicine in the Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina.

Dr. Limkakeng has served as chair of the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) Research Committee, and been the Course Director of the ACEP Research Forum from 2016-2018, the largest emergency medical research platform in the nation. He is also the Assistant Director of ACEP’s Emergency Medicine Basic Research Skills course. He was elected to the Nominating Committee of the Society of Academic Emergency Medicine.

As a researcher, Dr. Limkakeng has led multiple clinical trials and interdepartmental sponsored projects and is author on over 100 peer-reviewed manuscripts. These include studies in emergency conditions such as COVID-19, traumatic brain injury, hypertension, heart failure, thrombosis, stroke, envenomations, and septic shock. His research has been funded by grants and contracts totaling over $9 million dollars. He has lectured internationally on acute coronary syndrome, responsible conduct of research, design of clinical trials, and precision medicine in emergency care. He has led Duke’s involvement in NIH-funded research networks and in industry-funded work that led to FDA approval for multiple high-sensitivity cardiac troponin assays and point-of-care COVID-19 diagnostic tests. He has servesd as Co-PI for the Duke U24 Hub in the NIH Early Phase Pain Investigation Clinical Network (EPPIC-Net) (1U24NS114416) and now serves as a co-PI on the Duke U24 Hub award (1U24NS129498) in the NIH Strategies to Innovate Emergency Care Clinical Trials (SIREN) Network and in the NIH NINDS Strokenet network (1U24NS135250)

Broadly, my research focuses on a range of clinical and social issues that affect persons living with or at risk for HIV infection in resource-poor settings. In Tanzania, our group is applying novel methods to optimize HIV testing uptake among high-risk groups. We recently demonstrated that the Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE), a form of stated preference survey research, is a robust tool for identifying (a) which characteristics of HIV testing options are most preferred by different populations and (b) which tradeoffs individuals make in evaluating testing options. Building on more than a decade of productive HIV testing research in the Kilimanjaro Region, the next phase of our NIMH funded project will test the hypothesis that DCE-derived HIV testing options significantly increases rates of testing among groups at high risk for HIV infection. This work holds promise not only for optimizing HIV testing uptake in the Kilimanjaro Region, but also for applying novel tools in the service of translational epidemiology and implementation research.