Director, Master of Science in Global Medicine program
Clinical Assistant Professor of Population and Public Health Sciences
Dr. Navid Pour-Ghasemi received his B.A. in German Language and Literature from UCLA, and his M.S. and M.D. from the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. Dr. Pour-Ghasemi works with a variety of patients from all walks of life. His current research interests include Clostridium difficile and quality improvement with respect to infection control. In addition, he is a 2011 alumnus of the Global Medicine program, in which he completed the clinical track. One of his most memorable courses was MEDS 550: Clinical Medicine and Healthcare Reform in Taiwan, in which students traveled throughout Taiwan, learning about the Taiwanese healthcare system within both urban and rural areas.
Associate Director, Master of Science in Global Medicine program
Clinical Assistant Professor of Population and Public Health Sciences
Born and raised for part of her childhood in South Africa, Dr. Turner received her medical degree at St. Georges Hospital Medical School in London. After specialty training in Obstetrics and Gynecology in West London Dr. Turner moved to California to take her Masters in 2015 and joined the faculty at USC in 2017. Dr Turner’s main research interest is hypertension in pregnancy, she has been on the board of the charity Action on Pre-Eclampsia since 2003. Dr Turner has a secondary interest in safety in the work place, and works as a consultant in the film and TV industry in Los Angeles.
Clinical Assistant Professor of Pediatrics
Gitanjli (Tanya) Arora, MD, DTMH, received her undergraduate degree and Masters in Health Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, and received her medical degree from the USC Keck School of Medicine, followed by pediatric training at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. After completing her residency, Tanya worked domestically in general pediatrics and hospital pediatrics and internationally with Doctors Without Borders in South Sudan and Guatemala. In 2011, she earned her Diploma in Tropical Medicine at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Tanya then worked as a pediatric hospitalist at the University of California, Los Angeles, directed the UCLA Pediatric Residency Global Health Program, and served as Co-Director of the Global Health Education Programs at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine Center for World Health. She also is a member of the steering committee of the Association of Pediatric Program Directors Global Health Pediatric Education Group. Most recently, Tanya completed a fellowship in Palliative Medicine and is a pediatric palliative physician at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine
Dr. Blodget was born and raised in southern California, and graduated from Stanford University. She went on to pursue an M.P.H. degree in Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Boston University. She then decided to pursue a medical degree, and attended University College Cork in Ireland. She had always wanted an international perspective in medicine and she thought Ireland would be a great opportunity. She returned to the U.S. to pursue her internal medicine residency at Mt. Sinai in New York City. Finally, she returned to Los Angeles for her fellowship in Infectious Diseases at the University of Southern California. After completion of her fellowship, she stayed on as a faculty member in the Division of Infectious Diseases, where she has focused on infectious complications in the transplant patient population. Dr. Blodget has also been involved in Hospital Epidemiology and Antimicrobial Stewardship. Through it all, she has continued with special interest in global medicine and she is excited to begin her involvement with the program in global health.
Part Time Lecturer
Dr. Roger Clemens joined the Global Medicine faculty in 2015. He is the Associate Director of the Regulatory Science program and an Adjunct Professor within the USC School of Pharmacy. With More than 25 years of experience in the food industry and academia, upwards of 40 peer-reviewed publications, and over 70 invited medical and scientific lectures domestically and internationally, Dr. Clemens is a world leader in nutritional and regulatory sciences, and is a prominent member of the Institute of Food Technologists and the American College of Nutrition and American Society for Nutritional Sciences.
Clinical Assistant Professor of Population and Public Health Sciences
Dr. Aninda Das is a practicing Board certified pediatrician and pediatric infectious disease sub-specialist. He completed his residency in pediatrics and fellowship training in pediatric infectious diseases atChildren’s Hospital of Los Angeles (CHLA), which is academically affiliated with the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. He graduated from the MPH program (Health Policy and Management) at the University of California Los Angeles UCLA in 2015 as an upsilon phi delta member of the National Honor Society for Healthcare Management.
Dr. Das was born and raised in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India and graduated from Burdwan Medical College in Burdwan, India. He moved to the U.S. in 1992 and has lived in Los Angeles since 1994. After 2 years as an academic pediatrician at CHLA in the division of infectious diseases, he joined Healthcare Partners (now called Optum) in 2002 as a general pediatrician, where he worked for more than 14 years primarily in clinical care together with non-clinical administrative responsibilities. In 2016, he joined Eisner Health (also known as Eisner Pediatrics and Family Medical Center), a Los Angeles based non-profit community clinic; he was the Clinical Director of the San Fernando Valley Complex. In 2018, he returned to Healthcare Partners (now called Optum) in Mission Hills (San Fernando Valley) as a general pediatrician. He continues to practice in-patient pediatric infectious diseases at Huntington Hospital, Pasadena and Providence Tarzana Medical Center, Tarzana. He serves on the Infection Control Committee and the Antibiotic Stewardship Group at Providence Tarzana Medical Center, Tarzana. Dr. Das continues to be on staff at CHLA.
Dr. Das’ primary areas of expertise include clinical pediatrics, pediatric infectious diseases and public health. His other areas of expertise in healthcare include managed care, utilization management, quality improvement, value based care, infection control and antibiotic stewardship.
Part-Time Lecturer for the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences
Dr. Davar is currently faculty at the LAC+USC Division of Infectious Diseases, where he serves as the Assistant Program Director for the Infectious Diseases Fellowship Program. He also serves as the Infectious Diseases Clerkship Director for the Keck School of Medicine. His interests and endeavors with the LAC+USC Medical Center involve clinical infectious diseases, hospital epidemiology, antimicrobial stewardship, medical education, and clinical research pertaining to outcomes with both the administration of oral and short-term antibiotics and early transitions of care from the hospital to outpatient services. Dr. Davar received his B.S. in Biology from the University of California, Santa Barbara and is an alumnus of the Master’s Degree in Global Medicine Program ’11. He completed his medical school, residency, and chief residency at the George Washington University, where he also obtained a Master’s in Business Administration, and ultimately completed his Infectious Diseases Fellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles prior to joining the faculty at the LAC+USC Medical Center.
Professor of Clinical Medicine
Paul D. Holtom, M.D. is a long-time member of the faculty of the Keck School of Medicine of USC and maintains a number of integral roles in the Division of Infectious Diseases. Dr. Holtom is the Program Director for the Infectious Diseases Clinical Fellowship Training Program. Dr. Holtom serves as the Hospital Epidemiologist for LAC+USC Medical Center, Chair of the Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee for the Hospital, and Director of the Jeanette Wilkins Memorial Microbiology Laboratory, both at LAC+USC Medical Center. In conjunction with the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at USC, Dr. Holtom has accumulated extensive clinical and investigative background in the evaluation and management of bone and joint infections. Generated from this, Dr. Holtom has produced substantial body of publications in both the Orthopaedic and Infectious Diseases literature. In this process, he has emerged as a leading authority on the subject and served recently as the President of the Musculoskeletal Infection Society. Finally, as a product of his clinical experience serving the residents of Saipan in the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands during his service in the National Health Service Corps (NHSC), Dr. Holtom maintains interest and certification in Tropical Medicine.
Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine; Vice Chair, Educational Affairs; Director, Residency Program
Since starting as faculty here at USC I have always considered the strength of our program to be our faculty’s unwavering commitment to teaching and our Medical Center’s amazing diversity of patients and wealth of pathology. Since becoming Program Director, the Associate Residency Directors and I have designed this program to utilize our University’s abundance of resources to help each resident achieve their goals. With these things in mind, we believe we offer a training program that can provide any trainee with superb internal medicine training while helping to advance each person along their desired career path.
Clinical Assistant Professor of Population and Public Health Sciences
Dr. Benjamin LaBrot, a Southern California native, spent much of his youth in and on the waters with commercial fishing and research vessels. He received his medical training at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, and practiced for many years in the Irish Health Care System, where he assisted in setting up a long-term care elderly facility. Passionate about mission work in developing regions, Dr. LaBrot went on to incorporate his love for the ocean in founding the Floating Doctors in 2009. Since its first mission to Haiti in 2010, Floating Doctors has worked to bring acute and preventive healthcare services and medical supplies to remote areas in developing regions of the world, particularly in the rural communities of Bocas del Toro, Panama. Dr. LaBrot joined the Global Medicine faculty in 2016, bringing with him his remarkable experience in global healthcare delivery. His teaching interests include healthcare in resource-limited settings, infectious diseases, and palliative care.
Clinical Assistant Professor of Population and Public Health Sciences
Dr. Mansour Rostami joined the Global Medicine faculty in 2016. He earned his MD in 2003, and completed a fellowship at the UCLA Division of Cardiology. His work in the areas of anatomy, physiology, and pathology through research, invited lectures, textbook contributions, and teaching have made him an expert in these fields. As part of the Global Medicine faculty, he brings with him more than a decade of teaching experience.
Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine
Dr. Wald-Dickler, M.D. is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the USC Department of Medicine’s Division of Infectious Diseases. He is also the Medical Director of LAC+USC Medical Center’s Rand Schrader HIV Clinic where he sees patients and supervises trainees in addition to directing the clinic’s HIV, primary care and HIV Specialty Services and its its non-HIV Infectious Disease Clinic. Dr. Wald-Dickler completed both his Internal Medicine and Infectious Disease training at USC. He also completed training in Tropical Medicine at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Lima, Peru. He is a core member of the Antimicrobial Subcommittee of LAC+USC’s Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee, and he is highly involved in coordinating the activities of LAC+USC’s Antimicrobial Stewardship Program designed to combat the rise of antibiotic resistance through judicious hospital antimicrobial use.
Associate Professor of Spanish
David Zarazúa is an Assistant Professor (Teaching) of Spanish in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Director of the Medical Spanish Program at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. Professor Zarazúa teaches a variety of Spanish courses at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese; and medical Spanish courses at the Keck School of Medicine for the M.D. and the M.S. in Global Medicine programs. He is the advisor of the USC student organizations Global Medical Brigades and Public Health Brigades and is the vice-president of the Southern California Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. His main areas of interest are the use of technology in the language classroom and the use of Spanish in patient-health provider interactions. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in English at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey in Mexico; his Master of Arts in Spanish at New Mexico State University; and his Ph.D. in Spanish at USC.