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SSDS has administrative and financial headquarters in Boston and individual professional or project offices in other parts of the US and several other countries. All staff members are highly qualified and specialized primarily in the health sector, with a range of experience along the research-to-practice continuum, including:
SSDS has a very flat hierarchy. Seasoned professionals self-supervise and collaborate as appropriate. They have the same degree of latitude in making professional assessments and decisions as lawyers do within law firms or physicians do within health care settings. SSDS has three rules for staff:
SSDS strives for lean, streamlined operations at headquarters and exceptional quality in our consulting and research services. As a small business, SSDS is flexible, innovative, and efficient in providing high quality professional services, characteristics for which the best small companies are known.
The Institute for SSDS, a non-profit, provides similar services in the health, education and arts sectors.
Staff members currently hold academic faculty appointments with the following institutions:
Boston University School of Public Health Harvard University School of Public Health Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health Keele University, Centre for Health Planning and Management Tulane University School of Public Health SSDS technical staff have working fluency in several major languages, including:
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NOTE: You can send an e-mail message directly to any SSDS staff memberDr. Bell has been Vice-president of SSDS since 1995. She is currently the principal investigator for a portfolio of research studies, including a five-year NIH-funded study of alcohol use and injuries among active duty Army personnel, and a three-year NIH study of factors that modify the relationship between alcohol use and perpetrating or experiencing family violence or suicide. A recently completed Department of Defense-funded study examined self-reported behaviors, stress, demographic, and other factors influencing risk for Gulf War Syndrome. In addition, Dr. Bell is an investigator consulting on several other research studies ranging from long-term outcomes of disabled Army veterans, to the role of fatigue in motor vehicle crashes among Army soldiers.
An adjunct Assistant Professor at Boston University School of Public Health, Dr. Bell teaches both a section of the introductory core course in Behavioral Sciences and Public Health, which examines the influences of social and demographic factors on health and well being, and an elective course entitled, "Injuries: Causes, Consequences, and Controls." She is an affiliated faculty member at the Harvard University Injury Control Research Center.
Dr. Bell is a reviewer for manuscripts submitted to the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Injury Prevention, the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, and Psychiatry Research. She served actively for several years on the Society and Health Working Group (New England Medical Center and Harvard University) and the Injury Subcommittee for this group.
Dr. Bell earned a Doctor of Science degree from the Harvard University School of Public Health in the field of program evaluation, with minors in statistics and injury epidemiology. She holds an MPH in Health Administration from the University of Oklahoma and a BA in biology from Gonzaga University.
After graduating in the USA with a degree in Computer Science, he acquired a post-graduate diploma in Systems Analysis and Design in Jordan. He has advanced training in several technical aspects of Information Technology, and is certified as a Microsoft System Engineer, Network Administrator, and Systems Administrator. In the pharmaceutical sector, he has advanced training in marketing and market research. Areas of specialized expertise include Network Management & Systems Administration, Project Management, Hardware and Software Maintenance, and User Support and Training. He also has extensive knowlege of business management, having managed a highly successful self-owned business for more than eight years.
Mr. Budeiri is a citizen of Jordan, and is fluent in English, Arabic, and Hebrew.
Ms. Daly has helped a variety of non-profit organizations with their development and fund raising. Before joining SSDS, she was responsible for fund-raising for World Education, an American private voluntary organization based in Boston with worldwide programs. In Cambodia, she assisted two local organizations to expand and diversify their sources of funding, and she has taught in a program on resource diversification for other indigenous non-governmental organizations based in Africa. Ms. Daly is one of the principal authors of the Guide to Leveraging: How to Mobilize and Diversify Resources for Reproductive Health. Her bachelor's degree in International Relations is from Colgate University and she has a master's degree in Higher Education Administration from Boston College.
She has conducted cost analyses and related research to support decision-making:, to identify program and resource allocation priorities; to assess cost-efficient and cost-effective program design options; to develop and negotiate indirect cost rates with funding agencies; to determine the unit costs of health services; and to evaluate the impact of user fees on the demand for and sustainability of services.
Specific areas of expertise include program management and technical assistance to local NGOs in designing and implementing financial planning, management and computerized cost accounting systems, as well as funding diversification strategies. Ms. De Mattos is familiar with all aspects of financial and regulatory requirements related to program funding by major donors such as USAID, NIH, The World Bank, etc. She has designed, implemented and managed systems to meet these requirements from the sometimes complex and differing perspectives of contractor headquarters, overseas project field offices, and developing country NGOs, and has developed systems, training materials and tools (e.g. manuals) to strengthen capacity in financial analysis, planning and management for NGOs working with international agencies.
Ms. De Mattos' overseas work experience includes: Bangladesh, Cambodia, Eastern Caribbean, Kazakhstan, Philippines, and Russia, as well as US-based support to programs in numerous other countries in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.
Dr. Fiedler has served as a Vice President of SSDS since 1995 (with a three year hiatus from 2003-2005 when he was Senior Health Economist at the World Bank), and currently works on a portfolio of projects related to health economics, sector reform, and policy formulation.
His consultancies and research have included the application of a range of specialist skills and techniques including economic and financial analysis, project design, health planning, program (including quasi-experimental design-based) evaluation, and cost-effectiveness analysis, statistical analysis, and behavioral modeling.
His professional experience ranges from macro-level planning at the national level to evaluation of specific programs and non-governmental organizations delivering health services. He has extensive experience working with large data sets, including Living Standards Measurement Surveys (LSMS), Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), the U.S. National Medical Care Expenditures Surveys, and longitudinal U.S. State Medicaid data sets consisting of up to 38 million records. He has undertaken approximately 100 short-term consultancies both in the U.S. and in over 35 developing countries in all major regions of the world.
Widely published in the field of international health economics, he is the author of over 50 articles, book chapters, and studies published in journals including: Social Science and Medicine, World Development, Health Policy and Planning, the International Journal of Health Planning and Management, Health Policy, and the Economics of Education Review. He has served as a referee of manuscript submissions for Social Science and Medicine, World Development, Health Policy and Planning, the International Journal of Health Planning and Management, Public Health Nutrition and served on the World Bank s Health, Nutrition and Population Editorial Board.
Dr. Fiedler earned his B.A. in Economics, with Distinction, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees, also in Economics, from Vanderbilt University. He also holds a Graduate Certificate in Latin American studies from Vanderbilt.
Dr. Fronczak provided long-term technical support for public-private contracting of district level health services in Cambodia, and continues to provide periodic technical support for improving public-private partnerships. She has also provided leadership in developing methodologies to measure quality of health services, most recently as the coordinator for the Service Provision Assessment (SPA), a national level facility-based survey that provides information on maternal, child, and reproductive health services, including indicators for HIV/AIDS desired by donors funding scale-up programs. Dr. Fronczak continues to work to strengthen the methodology and promote utilization of facility-based information as a means for measuring and supporting the quality of health services. During the 1980s and '90s she provided long and short-term technical assistance for emergency nutritional and health responses for UNHCR and NGOs for several major African and Asian emergencies. She has strong research and analytic skills, has a working knowledge of French, and speaks some Bangla and Arabic. Dr. Fronczak first worked with SSDS in 2000, and has recently rejoined the organization.
Ms. Hollander received her M.P.H. from Boston University in January 2003 with a concentration in international health. Her coursework included reproductive health, pharmaceutical regulation, health communication, law and epidemiology. Her undergraduate degree was awarded in May 1999 from Washington University in St. Louis where she studied anthropology. Before joining SSDS, Inc., Ms. Hollander worked as a research assistant for a health outcomes research group at Boston University conducting and analyzing interviews for survey development. While receiving her M.P.H., she worked with local high school students to develop an anti-smoking documentary, incorporating advertising tactics with health promotion, and was also a part-time teacher and diagnostic testing coordinator for an after-school tutoring company. She worked for 2 years as a paralegal in a Washington, D.C. law firm performing legal research and litigation management. In 1999, she served as a media coordinator for a reproductive health and population stabilization non-profit organization where she wrote articles and editorials, and was the media liaison for the company.
Dr. Huff-Rousselle is the founder and President of SSDS. She has over 25 years of consulting, teaching and research in international health, including eight overseas residencies and roughly 100 short term consultancies in nearly 50 countries. Her experience includes policy, financing, and management issues in the health sector, with emphasis on macro and micro health sector financing, health and social marketing, non-governmental institutional development, and pharmaceutical sector financing and management.
In terms of practical implementation experience, she has directed multi-country technical assistance projects in health sector reform and financing, and in pharmaceutical management and financing. In long-term positions in Asia, the Caribbean, and the Middle East, she has been responsible for the establishment or development of five indigenous organizations (working in pharmaceutical supply, reproductive health and HIV/AIDS, or taining and research) and her doctoral research considered the effects of foreign aid on indigenous health sector organizations. Her research interests combine qualitative research (focus groups, case studies, stakeholder consultation, etc.) with financial and marketing analysis (costing, break-even analysis, incentives analysis, pricing, etc.).
Dr. Huff-Rousselle is currently on the governing council of APHA, and has current or former faculty appointments at Boston University, Harvard University, Tulane University, and Keele University (England) where she teaches graduate courses on health and social marketing, financial management and planning, and global pharmaceutical issues. She has developed a series of teaching case studies used in graduate programs; published over 50 articles and case studies on health sector issues in national and regional newspapers, professional magazines, and peer-reviewed journals; served as a reviewer of abstracts for APHA and Global Health Council, and as a referee of manuscripts for Health Policy and Planning, and the International Journal of Health Planning and Management. She has an M.A. from Goddard College, an M.B.A. from Boston University with dual certificates in Health Systems and in Public Management, and a Ph.D. in Management Studies from the University of the West Indies.
Dr. Hunt joined SSDS in 2008 as a Senior Research Scientist. His current work is focused on a major study of long-term outcomes in disabled Army veterans, under a grant from the Department of Defense.
Dr. Hunt has over twenty years of experience in occupational, environmental, and public health. He has substantial experience working with large data sets, such as Massachusetts Statewide inpatient hospitalization and emergency department data sets and State of New Hampshire Medicaid and health insurance claims data. Projects have included an analysis of inpatient end-of-life care expenditures in New Hampshire, geographical differences in health care utilization across private and public health insurance programs in New Hampshire, and a number of exploratory studies of the use of administrative health care data sets for Occupational Health Surveillance. He managed and conducted the exposure assessment for a community-based, nested case-control study of work-related asthma and designed and implemented the internal reliability and validity studies. Early in his career Dr. Hunt worked for engineering consulting firms, primarily serving US Federal and State agencies in conducting hazardous waste site investigation and clean-up activities, including preparation of environmental and human health risk assessments, design of occupational health control measures, and oversight of construction and remediation activities.
Dr. Hunt has taught Occupational Exposure Assessment for Epidemiology at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and Environment Health at Tufts University. He is a member of the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) National Occupational Research Agenda (NORA II) Manufacturing Sector Council.
Dr. Hunt earned a Doctor of Science degree from the University of Massachusetts Lowell in Occupational Epidemiology with minors in Industrial Hygiene and Work Environment Policy. He received his MS in Environmental Health Science from New York University and a BA in Biology from Vassar College. Dr. Hunt has been a Certified Industrial Hygienist since 1988.
Ms. Kay recently joined SSDS, Inc. in the Natick research offices. She is involved primarily with disability and injury prevention research projects. As a project manager, she offers planning, research and writing support and she coordinates and maintains Institutional Review Board and Human Subjects activity for SSDS research grants.
Ms. Kay received her M.S.P.H. from the University of South Carolina with a concentration in cancer epidemiology. Her coursework included effective data management for public health, biometrics, cancer and infectious disease epidemiology, and nutrition and public health. Her undergraduate degree is from the University of Connecticut where she studied environmental health.
Before joining SSDS, Inc., Ms. Kay worked as a research assistant for Tufts Medical Center and coordinated two NIH-funded Internet-based case-control studies on lupus and osteoarthritis. While receiving her M.S.P.H., she worked as a graduate research assistant to interview parent-child pairs for a CDC-funded large scale community-based study focusing on ADHD in youth. Ms. Kay additionally oversaw all data entry and verification at the University of South Carolina’s dietary assessment center for two NIH-funded multicenter intervention studies. In 2003, she interned within the Environmental Risk Assessment office at the Rhode Island Department of Health.
Ms. Komp worked for eight years at John Snow Inc. in the domestic health division. She participated in a wide range of projects in the areas of substance abuse, aging, and AIDS. She also participated in several studies evaluating state health programs. Prior to working for JSI, Ms Komp worked at Health Economics Research where she served as the company's network supervisor, and research programmer for several very large MEDICARE studies. Generally, these studies focused on cost and utilization of health care resources across the United States.
Ms. Phillips has worked in nearly 20 countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, including a residency of 4 years in Mexico, and has done consultancies for international and other agencies including the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Department for International Development (U.K.), the United States Agency for International Development and several of the agencies it supports, and the World Health Organization, including the WHO European Centre for Environment and Health. She has published approximately 30 journal articles, chapters, books, and guidelines for international agencies. Ms. Phillips graduated with two honours degrees in Science and in Economics from the Australian National University, Canberra, and has a Master's degree in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
She has a Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, in addition to a BA in Anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies and an MA in History from Stanford University. Having recently completed an M.Sc. in Plant Diversity, Dr. Pickering is currently working on the flora of volcanic mountains in Nicaragua and regenerating an ancient garden for public education in Morocco.
Dr. Rice is a Nutrition Specialist who has over 10 years experience in International Health, with particular focus on the relationship between micronutrient deficiencies and infectious diseases. Dr. Rice has extensive experience conducting field trials, and managing as well as evaluating national-level programs. Prior to joining SSDS, she was Vitamin A Program Director for Helen Keller International in Indonesia, where she coordinated a multi-year mass-media campaign that fostered public-private partnerships for vitamin A promotion, created a health-information resource center, and produced regular bulletins on research and program findings. Dr. Rice also spent three years as Research Fellow in the Community Health Division at ICDDR,B in Dhaka, Bangladesh, designing and implementing community-based nutrition field trials.
Dr. Rice has published widely on topics related to micronutrient deficiencies and the global burden of disease. She has specialized training in science writing and reporting for the general public, and has designed a multi-lingual website related to international health and nutrition. Dr. Rice has taught and lectured widely, and holds an appointment as adjunct assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her language capabilities include English, German, Bangla and Bahasa Indonesia.
Ms. Saunders is primarily interested in writing on health policy issues, with particular attention to analyzing and synthesizing lessons from research and program experience for decision makers. She is currently working on SSDS contracts with the World Bank and the USAID PHRplus project including: a series of policy briefs on the critical role of health as a contributing factor to development and economic growth; a policy brief on the impact of health system strengthening on maternal-child health services; a case study on the piloting of community-based health insurance programs; a technical brief and a toolkit on improving the integration of nutrition and early childhood development; and a synthesis of findings from new research on gender and education in Latin America. She designed and managed a major international technical conference on achieving the Millennium Development Goals, with a focus on improving health systems performance and health outcomes in Latin America . She is editing a collection of papers from the conference.
Ms. Saunders has an MSc in Social Planning from the London School of Economics and an MA in Education from Harvard University . She speaks Spanish and French. Ms. Saunders has worked in Latin America (Mexico, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Brazil, Argentina); Africa (Senegal, Burkina Faso, Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Mauritius); North Africa (Morocco); and Asia (Bangladesh).
Her educational background includes a liberal arts degree in American Studies, and an MPH from the Boston University School of Public Health in May, 2000, which included coursework in health behavior, preventive medicine, program evaluation, injury epidemiology and prevention, and cardiovascular epidemiology.
Ms. Shepard has a comprehensive understanding of current evidence and 25 years of experience in: sexual and reproductive health; adolescent health and development; women's health and development; women's rights and reproductive rights advocacy; and integration of gender and rights-based approaches into international development programs. Her interventions have helped to refocus advocacy, education, and service programs to be evidence-informed and results-based. She worked with Pathfinder International's Latin American programs in the 1980s, and as Program Officer for the Ford Foundation's Andean Region and Southern Cone office in Santiago, Chile from 1992-98. From 2000-2004, she was Senior Program Manager for the International Health and Human Rights Program at the Harvard School of Public Health, and she has been on the Board of Directors of Our Bodies, Ourselves since 2000.
Ms. Shepard is an established writer and researcher on sexual and reproductive health and rights, young people's health, and women's health and rights, with peer-reviewed articles and book chapters in Health and Human Rights, the International Journal on Men's Health, Reproductive Health Matters (co-author), and Responding to Cairo (Poipulation Council book). She co-authored Breaking the Silence: Young People's Sexual and Reproductive Health in the Arab Countries and Iran, and she is the author of Running the Obstacle Course to Sexual and Reproductive Health: Lessons from Latin America. Ms. Shepard has served as a reviewer for Health and Human Rights, Reproductive Health Matters, Comparative Education Journal, and Vanderbilt University Press.
Ms. Shepard earned her B.A. in Psychology from Swarthmore College, her M.Ed. in multicultural and bilingual education from Boston University, and her M.P.A. from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She has a reading knowledge of French and is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is the Cognizant Federal Agency for the SSDS Negotiated Indirect Cost Rate Agreement (NICRA), setting approved indirect cost rates applicable to all grants and contracts. SSDS Inc qualifies as a small, woman-owned business for US government procurements.
In 2001, the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Human Research Programs approved SSDS for Federal-wide Assurance #FWA00000953, related to ongoing and future human subject research activities.
| SSDS Home Page |
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Where We Work |
Who We Work With |
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