START RESEARCH ASSISTANT ALDINA MESIC SELECTED AS A FOGARTY GLOBAL HEALTH SCHOLAR FOR THIS YEAR TO INFORM ROAD SAFETY INTERVENTIONS IN GHANA

Congratulations to Aldina Mesic, START Research Assistant and Implementation Science PhD student in the Department of Global Health, for beginning her Fogarty Global Health Fellowship to support her work on informing the scale up of evidence-based road safety initiatives in Ghana.

Aldina’s project, “Collaboration to Inform Road Safety Intervention and Hazard Reduction in Ghana” will develop a road safety research working group and geo-link a road crash database with existing data sources to address research and evaluation priorities.

Aldina will be making use of an existing dataset of all road crashes since 2003 maintained by the Building and Roads Research Initiative, which has not been analyzed for spatiotemporal trends. In this Fellowship, Aldina will develop a working group to define priority research questions and build a dataset using the road crash data and other available data (census, vehicle registration, built environment, etc.). She will use the dataset she develops to answer the questions prioritized by the working group under the leadership of the National Road Safety. She will also use this data and the US National Highway Traffic Safety Association (NHTSA) Crash Injury Research (CIREN) data to model the impacts of road safety interventions and natural experiments on road injuries, traumatic brain injury, and death in Ghana.

Aldina will work under close mentorship of Dr. Barclay Stewart, START Faculty Lead, Assistant Professor at University of Washington School of Medicine, and Core Faculty at Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center. Aldina will also be working with Dr. Charlie Mock, MD, PhD, MPH, University of Washington, Department of Global Health, Department of Surgery, Department of Epidemiology, Dr. Adam Gyedu, MD, MPH, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Department of Surgery, Dr. Peter Donker, MD, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, Dr. James Damsere-Derry, PhD, Buildings and Roads Research Institute, and Ing May Obiri-Yeboah, National Road Safety Authority as co-investigators.