Our Team

Dr. Rochelle Dicker is Professor of Surgery and Anesthesia and Vice Chair for Critical Care at UCLA. She is the Co-Director of the Program for the Advancement of Surgical Equity. She graduated medical school AOA from University of Vermont. Her surgical residency was spent at UC San Francisco and the University of Vermont. She then went on to complete her Trauma and Critical Care fellowship at UCSF.

Dr. Juillard is a surgeon who has her roots in public health. Before going to medical school, Dr. Juillard was a rural health volunteer for the Peace Corps in Senegal, West Africa, which is where her interest in public health and health equity were cemented. As a surgeon, Dr. Juillard’s main research interests are identifying risk factors driving disparities in susceptibility to surgically treated diseases and inequity in access to treatment, then creating ways to mitigate these disparities.

Dr. Shekherdimian is an assistant professor of surgery in the Division of Pediatric Surgery at UCLA and director of the pediatric trauma program at Northridge Hospital. Shant has mentored over 15 medical students and residents on global health projects, many of which resulting in academic presentations and publications. Shant’s global health work is geographically focused in the Former Soviet Republics, specifically in Armenia, where he serves as an advisor to the Minister of Health.

Dr. DeUgarte is a Professor of Clinical Surgery in the Division of Pediatric Surgery at UCLA and Chief of Pediatric Surgery at Harbor-UCLA.  He also serves as the Director of Global Health Medical Student Research for the Global Health Program of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.  For the past decade, Dr. DeUgarte has been helping build pediatric surgical capacity in Mozambique.

Born and raised in Ethiopia, Dr. Beti Asnake migrated to Los Angeles when she was 16 years old. She attended UCLA for undergrad, then endured 6 long cold winters in the East Coast for graduate and medical school at the University of Virginia. She did her intern year at UC San Diego and residency at UC Davis. After her fellowship in Global Health & Equity in Anesthesia at UCSF, she spent a year working at Kaiser in Northern California.

Dr. Hubbard is a Professor of Biostatistics at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on the application of statistics to population studies with particular expertise in semi-parametric models and the use of machine learning in causal inference, as well as applications in high dimensional biology. Applied work ranges from the molecular biology of aging, wildlife biology, social epidemiology, infectious disease and acute trauma.

Sandra McCoy is an Associate Professor in the Division of Epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health. She studies how social, economic, and cultural forces influence disease transmission and health outcomes. During the past several years, Dr. McCoy has explored these relationships through the lens of HIV infection and reproductive health.

Rasheedat Oke, MD, MPH is one of the Global Surgery program managers at PASE, University of California, Los Angeles. She is a foreign-trained physician with specialty training in public health. She then received her MPH from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Maryland with a certificate in Epidemiology for Public Health Professionals. She has over a decade of public health experience collaborating in various academic, clinical, and programmatic settings.

Cindy Sagoe Umoh, MPH is a Global Surgery program manager at PASE, University of California, Los Angeles involved in projects aiming to strengthen surgical systems and address barriers to access to quality surgical care. She has a background in Pharmacy and received an MPH from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Maryland in 2018. Cindy has extensive experience working with diverse communities including Indigenous communities in Sub-Saharan Africa and the United States

Daniela manages the local and domestic projects and research activities for PASE. She received her B.S. in Public Health with an emphasis in Community Health Education in 2017 from Western Illinois University and is a recent 2022 graduate from California State University, Northridge receiving an M.P.H. in Applied Epidemiology. Prior to starting at UCLA, her professional experience included working with homeless women and children.