Please Join Us…
at Drexel University School of Public Health Grand Rounds with
Mehret Mandefro, MD, Director of Truth Aids
Physician, Medical Anthropologist, Filmmaker
“The Use of Digital Media in Public Health”
Thursday, Oct. 23, 2008, 4:30 PM
Geary Auditorium A (245 N. 15th St., First Floor, Philadelphia, PA)
Mehret Mandefro is a physician, medical anthropologist, filmmaker and Founding Director of TruthAIDS, a preventative health non-profit that uses digital media to teach about the societal determinants of health. As a public health trained physician her primary research interests includes the connection between health and human rights, the application of digital media in translation efforts.
She has worked as a public health practitioner in Kenya, Botswana, South Africa, Washington, D.C., and NYC on issues of access to care, community education efforts, and health workers training. Her prior fieldwork was conducted in Ethiopia analyzing HIV-positive women’s experiences with stigma, and the South Bronx, where she completed her internal medicine residency at Montefiore Hospital.
Mehret’s qualitative work about HIV/AIDS and gender equity in the South Bronx and Ethiopia is the subject of a feature-length documentary entitled All of Us that had its theatrical release in September 2008.
As a Health and Society Scholar, Mehret is advancing film as a method to teach and communicate about societal determinants of health. She directed, edited and wrote two short films as a first year RWJHSS Scholar for community based groups engaged in HIV prevention work in NYC and D.C. She is currently directing and writing a feature length documentary about the connection between violence prevention and cities as told through African American men in Philadelphia, and developing a TV pilot series for WYBE Channel 35 in Philadelphia on the societal determinants of health.
She received her M.D. from Harvard University, MSc in Medical Anthropology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine as a Fulbright Scholar, and A.B. in Anthropology from Harvard University.