| MARK BISANZO- Mark Bisanzo, MD is a board certified emergency medicine physician who currently practices at Hartford Hospital, Connecticut Children's Medical Center and the University of Connecticut Medical Center. After graduating from Middlebury College in 1998 with a MA in Biochemistry, Mark attended Harvard Medical School and then completed residency at the Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency Program based out of Brigham and Women's and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, MA. After working at Nyakibale Hospital during an elective as a fourth year resident as volunteer with Mission Doctor's Association, Mark became one of the founders of GECC and has since been working clinically at Nyakibale for 10 weeks a year helping to establish the emergency department and train local staff. When not practicing emergency medicine, Mark spends as much time as possible outside hiking, backpacking, running, skiing and biking. |
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HEATHER HAMMERSTEDT- Heather Hammerstedt MD MPH is a board certified emergency physician with Idaho Emergency Physicians at St. Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise, Idaho, where she practices clinically and she participates in the training of family practice resident physicians and medical students. Her position as an attending physician was as Clinical Instructor at Harvard Medical School and staff physician in the Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency (HAEMR) program at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. She has completed a Masters of Public Health at the Harvard School of Public Health within the Department of Population and International Health, with a concentration in health sector reform, Humanitarian Studies from the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. She is one of the founders of GECC, and currently has an ongoing clinical relationship with its Uganda project, Nyakibale hospital, and is conducting a research study with public health program implementation project to create a rustic pre-hospital system in the hospital's encatchment area. In 1999, she worked in rural Ecuador as an elementary school teacher with emphasis on environmental and health education. In 2003, she worked worked with western and ayurvedic trained physicians providing basic health care in rural northern Indian villages. She also holds certification as a Holistic Health Counselor, and has a certification in Medical Acupuncture. Initially trained in biochemistry at Bucknell University, she completed her medical studies at Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia and did her postgraduate residency in Emergency Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess' Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency program. She is married to Peter O'Connell, originally from Portland Oregon, whom she met when they were living, working, kayaking, skiing and smiling in Whitefish Montana, and they are both thrilled to be doing more of the same after their recent move back to the Northwest. |
| SARA NELSON-Sara graduated from Dartmouth College and Harvard Medical School. She did her residency in emergency medicine at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston where she was the chief resident. In the summer of 2009 she will move to Portland, Maine where she will work as an attending physician at Maine Medical Center. Her academic interests include international emergency medicine, wilderness medicine and medical education. |
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STACEY CHAMBERLAIN, MD-Stacey is a board certified emergency physician currently doing an international emergency fellowship at University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). She is very interested in development work in subsaharan Africa ever since she was in the Peace Corps in Senegal after graduating from Indiana University with a BS in business management. After the Peace Corps, she attended medical school at Northwestern in Chicago including taking an extra year to do international work including rotations in Zambia, Argentina and Thailand. She did her emergency medicine training also at Northwestern and had the opportunity to work in Uganda and Turkey during her training. Her first visit to Uganda to work with Nyakibale Hospital was during this time, before there was an emergency room. After finishing residency, she began an international emergency fellowship which involes working part-time clinically as an "ER doc" in Chicago, getting her Masters in Public Health (MPH) and doing a variety of international health emergencies such as in refugee camps and in tropical medicine, and she has done medical and public health work in Guatemala, Uzbekistan and India. Additionally, she was able to return to Uganda to assist in opening the Nyakibale ER and is recruiting emergency medicine residents to work there. She is excited about working with GECC to improve emergency medical systems in developing countries where medical care and resources are still severely lacking. She is getting married in August 2009 to Michael Swaine and in her little spare time enjoys traveling, long-distance bicycling and scuba diving. |
