Users in MD

Amy K. Liebman, MPA, MA (she/her) has devoted her career to improving the safety and health of disenfranchised populations. Since 1999, she has served as Director of Environmental and Occupational Health at Migrant Clinicians Network, where she has established nationally recognized initiatives to improve the health and safety of immigrant workers and their families. She oversees programs ranging from integrating occupational and environmental medicine into primary care to designing worker safety interventions.

She is a national leader in addressing worker safety and environmental health through the community health worker (CHW) model and is currently testing the CHW model with immigrant dairy workers. Prior to her current position, she directed numerous environmental health and justice projects along the US-Mexico Border including an award-winning, community-based hygiene education program that reached thousands of families living without water and sewerage services.

She has spearheaded policy efforts within the American Public Health Association to support the protection of agricultural workers and serves on the federal advisory committee to the EPA Office of Pesticide Programs.

Her programs have won several awards including the 2008 EPA Children’s Environmental Health Champion Award and the 2015 National Safety Council Research Collaboration Award. In 2011, Liebman received the Lorin Kerr Award, an APHA/Occupational Health and Safety Section honor recognizing public health professionals for their dedication and sustained efforts to improve the lives of workers. She is a past Chair of APHA’s Occupational Health and Safety.

Liebman has been the principal investigator and project manager of numerous government and privately sponsored projects. She has authored articles, bilingual training manuals and other educational materials dealing with environmental and occupational health and migrants. Liebman has a Master’s degree from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, and a Master of Arts from the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Liebman has traveled throughout Mexico, Guatemala, Argentina, Chile, and Europe. She is an avid soccer fan and loves to spend time with her husband and two sons. Together they spend a lot of time outdoors.

Juliana Simmons, MSPH, CHES, is thrilled to be serving as a Program Manager at MCN. Since joining MCN in 2014, Ms. Simmons has enjoyed coordinating various grant-funded programs focused on environmental health and worker health and safety. Most notably, she completed a NIOSH-funded research project exploring barriers to addressing occupational health in primary care. She currently plays a vital role on the Protecting Children When Parents Work project with the National Children’s Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety, as well as on MCN’s Susan Harwood Training Grant, supported by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Ms. Simmons has had the opportunity to represent MCN at various national conferences and webinars to raise awareness about the importance of environmental and occupational health in the context of improving health outcomes for mobile populations.

Ms. Simmons first became interested in migrant health during her undergraduate career at Salisbury University, when she had the opportunity to serve as an intern with MCN. After graduation, she moved to Baltimore to pursue a Master’s degree in public health from Johns Hopkins University, where she specialized in health communication and health education. During her time in graduate school, Ms. Simmons enjoyed working as a childhood safety educator and a domestic violence advocate, where she was able to hone her interests in injury and violence prevention. Ms. Simmons is a certified health education specialist and is also certified in public health.

Kerry Brennan grew up in Bel Air, Maryland. She attended Salisbury University in Maryland and graduated with bachelor’s degrees in Environmental Studies and Spanish. As part of her Spanish degree, she spent a semester abroad in Cuenca, Ecuador where she lived with a host family and studied Spanish and environmental issues of the Andes. After graduation, Ms. Brennan interned at MCN’s Maryland office and in October of 2013, officially joined the Environmental and Occupational Health (EOH) team.

Ms. Brennan’s work at MCN is focused on worker health and safety and environmental justice for migrant and immigrant populations. MCN’s Maryland office also works to integrate EOH into primary care through health center partnerships, clinician training, technical assistance, and resource distribution. Ms. Brennan has presented nationally on MCN's environmental and occupational health programs and has published an article examining farmworkers' roles in advocating for a strengthened Worker Protection Standard.

In addition to spending five months in Ecuador, Ms. Brennan has traveled to Costa Rica, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Peru. Outside of her work at MCN, Ms. Brennan’s passion lies in dance -- she teaches ballet, tap, jazz, and lyrical at a dance studio in Salisbury, MD. Ms. Brennan also enjoys outdoor activities such as kayaking and going hiking with her German Shepherd, Rust.

Anne Atkinson Hyre, CNM, MSN, MPH, Anne Hyre is the Director of Global Outreach at the American College of Nurse-Midwives in Silver Spring, Maryland. As Director, Ms. Hyre provides overall leadership for the global programs of ACNM. Prior to her position with ACNM she has worked with global strategies and healthcare development programs in Central Asia with Johns Hopkins and the JHPIEGO Corporation

Ms. Hyre completed her undergraduate degree at the University of California at Davis in International Relations and Russian in 1991, then went on to earn her MPH at Emory School of Public Health. Ms. Hyre received her BSN from Johns Hopkins in 1998 and completed the Nurse-Midwifery program at Georgetown University in 1999.

She has more than 15 years of experience in strategic planning, program design, management, and program evaluation for maternal and reproductive health in the US and abroad and has worked in more than 15 developing countries in the Eurasia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa.

Michael Piorunski is originally from Baltimore, MD and relocated to the Eastern Shore of Maryland to attend Salisbury University. Michael earned a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and English as a Second Language and has an interest in language use and Latin American culture. As an undergraduate, Michael studied codeswitching patterns in bilingual middle school students and spent 4 weeks in Ecuador studying Quechua and Andean culture.
Michael joined the Migrant Clinicians Network in September 2011 to assist Amy Liebman, Director of Environmental and Occupational Health. Before joining the Migrant Clinicians Network, Michael served as an AmeriCorps volunteer in Northwest Baltimore, providing community- based case management services to adjudicated youth and their families. He also served as a *VISTA volunteer in 2007.
Michael spends his free time volunteering on a local organic farm, tending to his city farm plot and running.

Blaire Siefken is a community health nurse in Baltimore, MD. She currently works at a small wellness center that serves inner city elders and as a health educator, teaching cardiovascular health classes with the Latino community. Before pursuing a career in nursing, she coordinated a Promotores de Salud program with migrant farmworkers in Maine. In her spare time, she is a family nurse practitioner student at Johns Hopkins University.

MD Mexico, Universidad La Salle
MSc Epidemiology Johns Hopkins School of Public Health
PhD Candidate Epidemiology Johns Hopkins School of Public Health

Areas of interest: Migrant health. Diabetes and Liver Diseases

Teresa Chapa, Ph.D., MPA

Dr. Teresa Chapa is the Senior Mental Health Policy Advisor for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Office of Minority Health. Her current areas of focus and development include the integration of mental health into overall healthcare, building a minority mental health pipeline and the state of Hispanic mental healthcare.

From 2007 until recently, she was awarded an Intergovernmental Personnel Assignment (IPA) from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to Mental Health America, where her principal focus was behavioral health disparities for racial and ethnic minority and other underserved populations.

Dr. Chapa served as Director of Policy and Data for the Office of Minority Health where she led the way for making Minority Mental Health a part of the overall health and health disparities agenda. She authored a policy brief titled: Mental Health Services in Primary Care Settings for Racial and Ethnic Minority Populations and brought key issues and recommendations to the attention of the HHS Office of the Secretary. She worked as a Federal coordinator and facilitator for the Surgeon General’s Workshop on Women’s Mental Health, and continues to represent the Office of Minority Health as the Federal Partner for the Mental Health Transformation and other targeted committees.

Prior to joining the Office of Minority Health, Dr. Chapa held several leadership positions within HHS including serving as the first Chief of the Office of Extramural Research for the National Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities the National Institutes of Health, and as Special Expert to the Center for Mental Health Services at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in areas of cultural and linguistic competency (CLC) and mental health disparities for minority and underrepresented populations. She created the first Center-wide advisory committee on CLC initiated, guided numerous minority mental health projects and grants, and assisted in the development of the Supplemental report of the Surgeon General, Mental Health: Culture, Race and Ethnicity.

Chapa has been the recipient of several awards, including the Health and Human Services Secretary’s Award for Distinguished Services for contributions made to the supplementary report of the Surgeon General, Mental Health: Culture, Race and Ethnicity, and a Congressional Certificate of Recognition for her role in establishing a Latina Mental Health Demonstration Project on Suicide Prevention in California’s 38th District for representative Grace Napolitano.

Dr. Chapa began her career in mental health over 30 years ago as a nurse working in California community mental heath settings, later attaining a Bachelor Degree in Psychology from San Francisco State University, a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, from the California School of Professional Psychology in Berkeley, CA and a Master Degree in Public Administration from The Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.