International Studies 30th Anniversary Celebration

Mike Frick is a senior project officer in the TB/HIV project at Treatment Action Group (TAG), an independent, community-based research and policy think tank fighting for better treatment, prevention and a cure for HIV, tuberculosis (TB), and hepatitis C virus. Mike works with activists and activist networks across the world to create a policy, funding and an advocacy environment that is conducive to TB research, the equitable uptake of evidence-based interventions against TB, and the promotion of human rights of people with TB. Mike majored in international studies at Kenyon, and and he has a master of science in global health and population from the Harvard School of Public Health. In 2009, he was a Fulbright Fellow at Kunming Medical College in Yunnan, China. He is from Oklahoma City and now lives in New York.

Sarah Gimbel (’92), a nurse epidemiologist, is an associate professor at the University of Washington in the departments of Family and Child Nursing and Global Health. She also co-directs the UW Center for Global Health Nursing, and acts as a senior technical advisor at Health Alliance International, a non-governmental organization based in Seattle. Sarah specializes in implementation research focusing on intervention development and testing for strengthening health systems (including quality improvement, process flow mapping, cascade analysis, improving quality and use of routine data), and the evaluation of implementation processes to identify drivers of success. She has spent over 15 years working overseas in resource limited settings in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, most extensively in Mozambique where she was seconded into the Ministry of Health as an advisor in HIV/AIDS care and treatment for 7 years and supported the scale-up of both antiretroviral (ART) and the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV programs nationally. In her current research, she works across multiple disciplines including civil engineering, computer science, management sciences, built environment, epidemiology, as well as other fields, to establish novel and innovative approaches to help frontline workers use their existing resources more efficiently and effectively. She is the mother of three girls, Lola, Shelter and Georgia and is happily married to another Kenyon grad, Kenny Sherr, ‘95.

Rachel Johnson, MPH is the managing director at the International Clinical Research Center, University of Washington where she oversees grants/finance and research operations for over 60 grant-funded research projects, focusing primarily on HIV prevention in East and Southern Africa. She previously served as the director of monitoring and evaluation in the Bureau of HIV/AIDS at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. In this position she administered over $65 million in federal funding for people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) and led a longitudinal housing study evaluating a novel housing placement program and its housing and health outcomes for chronically homeless PLWHA. She received her Master's in Public Health from Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and her bachelor's degree from Kenyon College. She lives in Seattle with her husband and dog, skiing, running or hiking
depending on the weather.

After graduating from Kenyon, Meg spent a summer as an organizer with Environment Oregon before moving to Chicago and then Boston to work for Grassroots Campaigns, a progressive organization that specializes in running face-to-face campaigns for political parties, candidates, and advocacy groups. Over four years she helped grow membership bases and mobilize citizens for groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, the Democratic National Committee, Planned Parenthood and Amnesty International. With the leadership skills honed by working as an office director, regional director and account executive, Meg set aside political views in 2011 to join the U.S Foreign Service. So far she has served two-year tours in Abuja, Nigeria, and Tijuana, Mexico, and spent six months at the U.S. Mission to the UN in New York. She is currently assigned to the State Department’s Consular Affairs Bureau in Washington, DC.

Sarah Maniates is graduate student at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University and will be graduating in May with a master's degree. While at Sanford, her studies have focused on international development policy and education policy. Last summer she interned at the U.S. Agency for International Development working on education in sub-Saharan Africa, and she hopes to continue doing similar work after graduation. After graduating from Kenyon, Sarah worked in Washington, D.C. for a year in communications and policy with an international health organization. From 2014-2016 she was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ethiopia, working in the education sector as an 11th grade English teacher.

Alys Spensley began her tenure as the deputy spokesperson at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing in August 2017. Alys joined the Foreign Service in 2004. Most recently, she served as the cultural affairs officer in the Public Diplomacy Section of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), and as the director of AIT's American Center, responsible for strengthening educational and cultural ties between the United States and Taiwan (2013-2017). Before that, she was in Washington, D.C. in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs as a staff assistant and as the Policy and Coordination Officer in the Office of Public Diplomacy (2011-2013). Her first posting was at the U.S. Embassy in Kathmandu, Nepal (2005-2007) and she also served as the cultural affairs officer and the 2010 expo liaison officer in Shanghai (2008-2011). Prior to becoming a Foreign Service officer, Alys worked as a financial analyst in New York City and, before that, conducted field research as a Fulbright grantee in Yunnan Province, China. She was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, holds a degree in international studies from Kenyon and speaks Nepali and Mandarin Chinese. Her husband, Andrew Lebkuecher, is also a Foreign Service officer. They have three children.

Kate Brown is a supervising attorney at Friends of Farmworkers (FOF) in Philadelphia. FOF is a non-profit agency that provides free legal services to migrant and immigrant workers throughout Pennsylvania. Kate joined the organization in 2013 to address the immigration-related legal barriers that often prevent workers from asserting their workplace rights. She currently represents victims of labor trafficking in their applications for immigration relief and in civil legal claims against the traffickers. She received her J.D. from the Drexel University Thomas R. Kline School of Law in 2013. Before attending law school Kate worked as an immigration representative at the Nationalities Service Center in Philadelphia. She received a master's degree in Latin American studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007 and majored in international studies and Spanish at Kenyon. She lives with her husband and their two children in New Jersey.

Shrochis Karki is a consultant who leads education systems at OPM, an international research based policy institute in the UK. He works with governments as well as bilateral and multilateral organizations to make public policies more effective in low and middle income countries, and his recent work has focused on Pakistan, Philippines, Tanzania and Nepal. Shrochis is also the executive director of the Samaanta Foundation, a not-for-profit organization which provides comprehensive higher education fellowships to meritorious public school graduates from disadvantaged communities in rural Nepal. After graduating from Kenyon with a double major in international studies and political science, Shrochis completed an M. Phil. in development studies and a D. Phil. in international development at the University of Oxford as a Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Graduate Scholar.

Leah Missik is the program manager of Built Green, a green home certification program in Washington state. She has overseen the program’s continued growth, conducted studies that received national attention, and collaborated on the expansion of green building incentives in the region. Additionally, Leah translates and writes articles for Russian environmental activists on the challenges they face and on environmental issues in Russia. She has also volunteered with Great Baikal Trail, a trail building and environmental education organization in the Lake Baikal area. Leah is in the 2018 Class of Leadership Tomorrow and is a senior fellow of the Environmental Leadership Program. She holds her MPA from Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs, with concentrations in environmental policy and international affairs. At Kenyon, she majored in modern languages (Russian and German) and international studies, with a concentration in environmental studies.

Lane Jost currently serves as the director of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and philanthropy at Santander Bank, N.A. one of the country’s largest retail and commercial banks with assets of more than $79 billion and located in eight states across the economically vibrant northeast corridor and based in Boston. Prior to working at Santander, Lane spent six years at the professional services firm PwC LLP where he was the operations leader of the US firm’s national impact investing portfolio, including managing the firm’s national pro bono program and its carbon reduction efforts. Prior to joining PwC, Lane worked as a CSR and sustainability consultant for Sodexo North America where he was primarily responsible for measuring and reducing the food service and facilities management company’s environmental impact, as well as educating key internal stakeholders on business case for delivering a more sustainable suite of products and services. He holds a master’s degree in international development economics and non-profit management from the University of California, San Diego and majored in international studies at Kenyon.

Kelsey has worked for McMaster-Carr for almost three years, starting in their management training program. She held two supervisor positions in other departments and was recently promoted to manager of Rack Stockkeeping & Warehouse Initiatives. She manages a stockkeeping team for a large distribution center as well as our warehouse project initiatives. As part of Kelsey's role, she works on developing effective leaders in performance and operational management. She also perform analyses to evaluate and optimize workflows.

Kimberly is a social sector jill-of-all-trades who has worked with a wide range of local and global organizations over the past 15 years in the fields of agricultural development, microfinance and social investment, indigenous and community-led development, global health, immigrant rights, education and youth services. She has worked and traveled extensively in Latin America, South Asia and Central and Southern Africa. Her aim is always to channel organizational resources to align clarity of mission with sustained organizational capacity and a keen understanding of the unique value proposition each organization offers in the sea of social change actors. As an independent consultant and volunteer for the past several years, Kimberly works with leadership teams in the areas of strategic and financial planning, organizational and board development, change and crisis management, resource and partnership development, program management, research and evaluation. At Kenyon, she double majored in international studies and economics with a concentration in environmental studies, and spent a year studying abroad in Argentina and Costa Rica. She also received a master's degree in international development/development economics from Johns Hopkins-SAIS in Washington, D.C. Kimberly has been based in Seattle since 2005 where she has two young sons and spends as much time outdoors as possible.