Charlene Barina

Charlene Barina is a public health practitioner with 15 years of experience in work bridging health and technology. Her work has primarily been in monitoring, evaluation, and health information systems implementation with a focus on sustainability and building local capacities in governmental and non-governmental local organizations at all levels of work.

Ms. Barina worked for 8 years in country offices in Vietnam, Thailand, Liberia, and Mongolia and has contributed to/supported work in the Greater Mekong Sub-Region, Malawi, Zambia, and Ethiopia. She is particularly interested in ways to develop and roll out technical solutions that reduce workloads for health workers and provide more reliable and accurate information for decision-making, integration and use of health metadata as a global public good, and assessment of machine learning technologies for fairness and inclusion. She started work with Vital Wave in 2021, assessing digital solutions to address gaps in HIV care cascades in sub-Saharan Africa.

Ms. Barina holds a Master’s in Public Health from the University of Washington. She also holds a BA in Computer Science and a Health Policy Certificate from Duke University. She is in the process of completing a MS in Computer Science with a specialization in Machine Learning from the Georgia Institute of Technology.