Sahera Dirajlal-Fargo, MS, DO, associate professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Colleen Fant, MD, MPH, assistant professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Emergency Medicine, both physicians at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, have been named co-directors of the Center for Global Pediatric Health, a part of the Robert J. Havey, MD Institute for Global Health. The appointments are effective February 1, 2025.
The Center for Global Pediatric Health’s activities will include collaboration between the Havey Institute for Global Health and Lurie Children’s Hospital.
Dirajlal-Fargo is an attending physician in infectious diseases at Lurie Children’s. She obtained her DO at the University of New England and completed a pediatrics residency at Phoenix Children’s Hospital. She spent a year working as a Pediatric AIDS Corps physician for the Baylor International Pediatric AIDS Initiative in Malawi. She also trained in Infectious Diseases at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC. Dirajlal-Fargo is a translational investigator, whose research portfolio focuses on complications of HIV in children and youth in the US and sub-Saharan Africa. She is the principal investigator on multiple NIH-funded studies in the United States and Africa to better understand the long-term health outcomes and chronic comorbidities associated with HIV in adults and children. She specializes in providing HIV care and treatment to infants, children, and adolescents both living with, and exposed to, HIV as well as all aspects of pediatric infectious diseases.
Fant is an attending physician in emergency medicine at Lurie Children’s. After graduating from Northwestern University with a minor in global health, she spent a year in Ghana working on sexual health programming with a non-profit organization, then attended medical school at Tufts University School of Medicine and completed her residency at Massachusetts General Hospital for Children, followed by her emergency medicine fellowship at Lurie Children’s.
Fant has worked in the Department of Pediatrics co-leading trainee programming in global health and has served in leadership roles with the Center for Global Health Education, also a part of the Havey Institute for Global Health. She has been instrumental in growing a partnership between Lurie Children’s and Bugando Medical Center in Mwanza, Tanzania, as well as with Maseno University in Kisumu, Kenya. Her current work focuses on increasing accessibility of simulation based medical education in resource variable settings, as well as partnership-focused projects in ultrasound, pediatric trauma, and pediatric cardiology programming.
Along with colleagues at Lurie Children’s, co-directors Dirajlal-Fargo and Fant will lead the new Center for Global Pediatric Health, which becomes the tenth center within the Havey Institute for Global Health.
Read more about Dirajlal-Fargo and Fant’s work in “Why Building Capacity Is Key to Deliver Better Global Health Outcomes.”
