Debora B. Freitas López, MS
Executive Director
Executive Director
Team Leader
Director, Research and Evaulation
Team Leader
Team Leader
Director, Public Relations and Communications
CCP Country Representative
Ethiopia
Director, The Challenge Initiative
Nigeria
Director, Finance and Administration
Team Leader
Director, Business Development
Director, Knowledge Management
Team Leader
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Executive Director
Debora B. Freitas López, MS, is the executive director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs. She is a global leader in social and behavior change communication with broad-based experience leading programs in health and non-health sectors across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean and the Middle East. Debora has more than 20 years’ experience establishing sound initiatives for specific social issues and strengthening the capacity of public and private sector and civil society actors so that they can develop local solutions for challenges they face. She has a demonstrated record of success in program design and implementation, strategic planning, partner engagement and communications.
Debora has served on various global boards and technical groups, including recently as the chair of the Global Alliance for Social and Behaviour Change. She also is part of FP2030’s Family Planning High Impact Practices Technical Expert Group and served two terms on the Steering Committee for the SBC Working Group of RBM Partnership to End Malaria. Additionally, she was part of the 2022 North American Cohort for WomenLift Health’s Leadership Journey, an initiative designed to support women through the challenges and opportunities of advancing to senior leadership positions in global health. Her leadership project focused on diversifying leadership through a behavior-led systems thinking approach. She has an MS in Health Evaluation Services/Epidemiology from the University of Virginia.
Team Leader
Robert Ainslie is a Team Leader working across global health projects focused on family planning, malaria, nutrition, COVID-19, WASH, and capacity strengthening.
He brings more than 30 years of experience in social and behavior change communication across Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Robert has led and supported initiatives spanning a wide range of health areas and holds a Master of Arts in International Affairs (Communication & Development) from Ohio University.
Director, Research and Evaluation
Stella Babalola is the director of research and evaluation at CCP and is a professor in the Department of Health, Behavior and Society at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. A demographer by training, she has more than 30 years of experience in behavioral research and has worked extensively in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.
Over the past five years, her research has focused largely on family planning, malaria and adolescent reproductive health. She has conducted research and published extensively on multiple reproductive health issues, including family planning, malaria, maternal health, sexual and gender-based violence, adolescent sexuality and HIV/AIDS. She was recently a visiting professor with the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa under the Carnegie African in Diaspora Program. The program affords Africans in diaspora the opportunity to visit African institutions for short periods of time to strengthen the capacity of faculty members and graduate students. Stella has a PhD from the Université de Paris.
See Stella Babalola’s published research.
View Dr. Babalola’s faculty page at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Team Leader
Uttara Bharath Kumar, MHS is a senior program officer at the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs and associate faculty at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She has over 30 years of experience in global public health practice in Africa and Asia on a wide range of public health issues ranging from HIV, TB and RNMCH to non-communicable diseases, cancers and mental health. She currently leads CCP’s role as on the UK Government-funded, Women’s Integrated Sexual Health (WISH2) project led by the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) in seven East and Southern African countries. She is also a team leader for CCP’s work in India.
She teaches at BSPH and has led SBC trainings in 20 countries. She has numerous conference presentations and publications to her credit. She is an advisory board member for the Gupta Klinsky India Institute (GKII) and a member of the Technical Advisory Group at the World Health Organization on Behavioral Sciences for Better Health. She was instrumental in founding and mentoring three SBC-focused NGOs – Nalamdana, Zambia Center for Communication Programs, Center for Communication and Change – India.
Bharath Kumar earned her MHS in International Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a BA in English from Wellesley College.
Team Leader
Sierra Leone, Nigeria
Andrea Brown Anschel has worked with CCP as a program officer since 2010 and has more than 14 years of experience working in international health. Andrea has vast experience in training and capacity building. With a Baltimore-based team, five times she has organized and co-facilitated CCP’s signature four-week Leadership in Strategic Communication Workshop held in the United States. She has also co-led in the organization and facilitation of five two-week leadership workshops in Senegal, Barbados, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Rwanda.
Andrea is currently a senior program officer supporting Breakthrough ACTION, CCP’s global social and behavior change project, as a team leader for Sierra Leone and Nigeria. Specifically, Andrea supports supervision, management and oversight on several technical areas including zoonotic diseases, malaria, COVID-19, WASH, family planning/reproductive health and maternal, newborn and child health.
Andrea previously provided technical and operational support on CCP’s global malaria program. She has creative community outreach experience and has a proven commitment to social change and advocacy. Andrea has also worked as a health educator for rural mothers and children and a project coordinator for famine-stricken communities in Madagascar. She also has extensive experience working with domestic organizations, including non-profits that provide skills and opportunities for marginalized populations. Andrea has a master’s in social work from the University of Maryland with a concentration in community development and social action.
Stephanie Desmon has been director of public relations and communications for the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs since June 2017. In this role, she oversees all aspects of communications for the center, including the website, social media, marketing materials and media relations.
Stephanie is also a co-host of Public Health On Call, a podcast focused on COVID-19 and produced by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Prior to joining the center, Stephanie was director of media and public relations at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health for three years and spent nearly five years in the media office at Johns Hopkins Medicine.
Stephanie, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, spent the first 15 years of her career as a newspaper reporter, winning a number of national awards in various positions at the Baltimore Sun, the Palm Beach Post, the Florida Times-Union and the Birmingham Post-Herald. She has a Master of Arts in Science Writing from Johns Hopkins University.
CCP Country Representative
Ethiopia
Simon Heliso leads CCP programs in Ethiopia. He has a diverse background leading multisectoral international development and emergency response programs in Burundi, South Sudan and Ethiopia with international organizations such as World Vision and Alight (formerly American Refugees Committee International).
Simon has a doctorate in business management from the Swiss Management Center Switzerland and a master’s degree in development economics from the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom.
Director, The Challenge Initiative (TCI) for CCP in Nigeria
A public health physician, she has a wealth of experience in implementing reproductive health and family planning programs within the public and private sectors. She is passionate about integrating best practices in government systems and engaging stakeholders to strengthen health systems.
She previously led CCP’s Post Pregnancy Family Planning Project from inception to close-out and was recently the senior technical adviser for the Momentum Safe Surgery Project funded by USAID. Taiwo holds an MSc in Global Health Policy and Management from Brandeis University and an MD from Obafemi Awolowo University.
Director, Finance and Administration
Daa’iyah Lang, the interim director of finance and administration for CCP, has worked in financial management for public health for more than 15 years. During her time at CCP, she has held many roles in the United States, Africa and Asia, from overall financial oversight for projects to providing technical assistance to other CCP financial professionals worldwide. Before taking on the role of interim director of finance, she served as CCP’s director of finance in Uganda, and was CCP’s director of operations in Tanzania prior to that. In these roles and others in CCP’s Baltimore office, she has ensured compliance and financial integrity for the programs she supports without losing sight of the pressing urgency of the public health work.
She is also a member of CCP’s core leadership teams and its Anti-Racist Action Group.
Team Leader
Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea
Shannon McAfee currently serves as team lead for CCP’s country programs in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Guinea, which include projects focused on integrated health, the GHSA portfolio, education, Ebola, and the COVID-19 response.
She has 25 years of experience designing, leading and implementing health and development projects across 16 countries in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. Her areas of specialty include health service delivery, social marketing and social and behavior change.
Prior to joining CCP, her experiences include technical and programmatic support to USAID’s flagship maternal and child health integrated programs and to multiple social marketing projects.
For 13 years, she was based in Madagascar, where she received the honor of knighthood, with the “Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite de Madagascar.” She has an MPH from the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.
Cassandra Mickish Gross has a decade of professional and academic experience developing, implementing and evaluating health and human services programs. She works with teams across the center and organizations around the world to form strong partnerships to solve critical health problems with creative solutions. She has also led digital health activities in South Africa and Uganda to support pregnant women living with HIV to stay in care and have healthy babies.
Prior to her current role at CCP, Cassie provided technical assistance to State governments to significantly improve processing of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) applications to ensure timeliness, efficiency and accuracy in benefit determinations. She holds an MPH from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Director, Knowledge Management
Tara Sullivan leads CCP’s knowledge management program, is the former project director for Knowledge SUCCESS and teaches in the Department of Health, Behavior, and Society at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She has worked for more than 20 years in international health with a focus on program evaluation, knowledge management (KM), quality of care and family planning/reproductive health (FP/RH).
Tara has bridged a knowledge gap in the field of KM by developing frameworks and guides for KM program design, implementation and monitoring and evaluation and by exploring the contribution that KM makes to strengthening health systems and improving health outcomes. Her research has examined knowledge needs at multiple levels of the health system and has investigated how social factors (social capital, social networks, social learning) contribute to knowledge sharing outcomes. Tara also has researched factors that influence the provision of quality of care in global FP/RH programs. She has lived and worked in Botswana and Thailand and holds degrees from Cornell University (BS) and Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine (PhD, MPH).
Team Leader
August is the team leader for the CCP’s Baltimore-based projects and has more than 15 years of experience in partnering with community organizations and government agencies on community health initiatives to address health outcomes and health disparities through formative research, strategic planning, health communication and evaluation and monitoring.
August earned Master of Health Science Degree in Clinical Epidemiology and a PhD in Social and Behavioral Sciences from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
