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Advocate, educator, editor, researcher, nonprofit leader, author, speaker and consultant
Renata Schiavo, PhD, MA, CCL, is a global health practitioner and a public health/sociomedical sciences academic with a deep commitment to public service, health equity, community engagement, and systems-driven solutions. She is a Senior Lecturer at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, Department of Sociomedical Sciences; the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Communication in Healthcare: Strategies, Media, and Engagement in Global Health (Taylor & Francis); and a Principal at Strategies for Equity and Communication Impact (SECI), a women-owned global consultancy. She is the Founder and Board President of Health Equity Initiative, a nonprofit volunteer organization, and serves as Senior Editor of the Journal of Health Equity (Taylor & Francis), and on the the editorial board of Health Equity (Mary Anne Liebert). She also leads an international summer professional development program on “Health and Risk Communication in Pandemics and Beyond" at The American University of Rome. Dr. Schiavo is the author of Health Communication: From Theory to Practice (Jossey-Bass, an imprint of Wiley), and the lead editor of Health Equity: Strategies for Action (Wiley) to which she also contributed several chapters. A passionate advocate for health, racial, and social equity, Renata is a committed voice on the importance of addressing barriers that prevent people from leading healthy and productive lives, Renata has significant teaching and training experience, including at SECI. Her capacity building, training and workforce development experience includes participants from 500+ organizations. Renata's work is at the interface of global health, health and risk communication, health equity, social and behavior change, health policy, multisectoral partnerships, systems thinking, and community and patient engagement. She has worked with leading organizations, as a partner, grantee, advisory council member, or senior advisor/ consultant, including UNICEF, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FIOCRUZ-Brazil), the Office of Minority Health Resource Center, HHS Office of Minority Health, the Rwanda Ministry of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Macy’s, Solving Kids’ Cancer, and Safe States Alliance. As part of these efforts, she has been focusing on research, interventions, policies, and advocacy, to improve health outcomes among groups from underserved and marginalized settings. Schiavo’s extensive experience spans 20+ health and human rights areas, including health equity, COVID-19, epidemics and emerging disease outbreaks, maternal, infant, newborn, and child health, immunization, addressing misinformation, mitigating vaccine hesitancy, and building trust in science and health information. Across projects, she has worked with a variety of stakeholders and local communities, including communities of color and immigrant communities in the United States, and low-income groups, refugees, and patients from underserved areas in global settings. As an advocate, researcher, and practitioner, Dr. Schiavo is interested in community- and system-driven solutions for health, equity, and communication issues. She is the author of 85+ publications and 190+ presentations. As a global health practitioner, she focuses on capacity building and training, curriculum design, community building and engagement, intervention design and evaluation, health and risk communication strategy, community-based participatory research (CBPR), participatory evaluation, and systems-driven strategic planning. She leads The Science of Trust Initiative, an interdisciplinary effort to investigate the issues that contribute to trust or mistrust in health and science information, at the Journal of Communication in Healthcare. She is also routinely consulted on community-based strategies and health equity metrics and principles for public health and healthcare interventions, health policies and R&D therapeutic targets. Renata has also been actively engaged in the response to COVID-19 both in the United States and around the world. She spearhead Health Equity Initiative's advocacy efforts to make sure health equity stayed on the table during the pandemic and has been leading community engagement efforts and forums to raise the influence of community voices on addressing COVID-19 inequities. In addition, she has collaborated with the Region 2 Public Health Training Center to investigate barriers to responding to COVID-19 in New York State, and to design training modules to promote a community- and equity-driven approach to the COVID-19 response. At SECI, she has been working on building the capacity of public health professionals, community leaders, population health professionals, and health journalists both in the United States and Brazil, to implement a health equity- and human rights-driven lens in pandemic response and recovery efforts. Her work and perspectives on this domain have appeared in Health Promotion Practice, the Journal of Communication in Healthcare, and Health Equity, She has also been acting as a media resource on COVID-19-related issues with interviews published in The Washington Post, ReachMD, and Elite Daily, and several blogs and podcast programs. Other example of Renata's work include the evaluation of a communication initiative to address vaccine hesitancy and promote pediatric routine immunization (RI) in Kyrgyzstan; The One Thousand Days in The Land of One Thousand Hills national program in Rwanda to reduce chronic malnutrition and its impact on children and pregnant and breastfeeding women; strategic planning and capacity development for a global handwashing campaign; the development of an online training program to frame diversity, equity, and inclusion in intervention and policy design for injury and violence prevention in the United States; and strategic planning counseling and program evaluation for a national initiative to reduce inequities in infant mortality rates (IMR) within the Black community and other communities of color in the United States. In addition, she contributed to the design of a therapeutic development initiative for pediatric cancer. Renata is a member of SheSource; a member and past chair of the APHA PHEHP Health Communication Working Group (HCWG); and an active member of the APHA Public Health Education and Health Promotion (PHEHP) and International Health sections. She serves as Senior Advisor and Past Chair, Feature Sessions, of the APHA Global Public Health Film Festival. Among international affiliations, Renata is an Associate member of the CORE Group; a member of the UNICEF Social and Behavior Change (SBC) Global Web Roster; and the World Health Organization Strategic Partnerships for International Health Regulations (IHR) and Health Security (SPH) expert database. She has significant nonprofit management experiences. She serves on the boards od directors of Health Equity Initiative and The People's Theathe, and previously served on the board of Solving Kids Cancer and the Italian American Committee on Education (IACE), and as an elected member of the APHA Governing Council. She has completed a clinical practicum and volunteer rotations in Child Life, As part of these experiences, Renata has provided psychosocial care and opportunities for educational enrichment to families and children from underserved backgrounds at the Save A Child’s Heart in South Africa, and the Ronald McDonald House Family Room at Kings County Hospital and Reach Out and Read program at Bellevue Hospital, both in New York City, Dr. Schiavo's diverse background includes past academic positions at the CUNY School of Public Health at Hunter College, New York University, Long Island University, and The College of New Jersey; Executive Vice President, Cooney Waters Group (now Health Unlimited); Chief Editor, BMC Medicine; and Head, Corporate and Marketing Communications and Social Responsibility Programs, Rhodia Farma-Brazil (now Sanofi Aventis). She has significant nonprofit management and leadership experience including current board membership positions at Health Equity Initiative and The People's Theather and past board positions at Solving Kids Cancer, Public Health Foundation Enterprise (now Heluna Health), the Italian American Committee on Education (IACE), and the Governing Council of the American Public Health Association. Early in her career, Dr. Schiavo was a post-doctoral research scientist at Columbia University, and New York University, where she worked on numerous projects in the areas of cancer and cystic fibrosis. She holds a PhD in Biological Sciences (Clinical Biology/Human Genetics concentration) from the University of Naples (Italy) where she completed a dissertation thesis on hereditary diseases and genetic polymorphisms, a M.A. in Journalism and Mass Communication from New York University, and a Post-Graduate Certificate in Child Life from the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), with an emphasis on family and community systems, trauma in children's life, and research on child life interventions in community and clinical settings. A frequent speaker in U.S. and international settings, Renata is fluent in English, Italian, and Portuguese, and can read and understand Spanish and French.
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