Biography
Jessica H. Beard, MD, MPH is currently a chief resident in general surgery at UCSF. As an NIH Fulbright-Fogarty Fellow in medical school, she did PMTCT and obstetric fistula research in Kenya. Most recently, she has been involved in a laparoscopic skills development program for surgeons and trainees at the Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences (MUHAS) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania as a UCSF Global Surgery Scholar. She has also studied outcomes after surgery done by non-physician clinicians in Tanzanian district hospitals. Her core interests in global surgery include inguinal hernia epidemiology, the delivery of safe and effective hernia care in low-resource settings, and surgical task-shifting in sub-Saharan Africa. She speaks Swahili fluently.
Education
Yale School of Medicine, MD
Masters in Public Health at UC Berkeley, Interdisciplinary Program
Clinical Interests
General Surgery
Trauma Surgery
Hernia Surgery
In the News
Grants and Funding
UC Berkeley Block Grant Award covering tuition to the School of Public Health
Research Narrative
Hernia Epidemiology
With our colleagues from Ghana and Tanzania, we created and updated a method to estimate inguinal hernia epidemiology, including prevalence and incidence, in low-resource settings. At current hernia repair rates in Tanzania, a backlog of nearly 1 million hernias for repaired will develop in the next ten years. This work has sparked Jessica’s participation in the Essential Surgery volume of the Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries, 3rd Edition, for which she was the lead author on the chapter, “Hernia and hydrocele.” Jessica also has collaborated with Dr. Michael Ohene-Yeboah of Kwame Nkrumah University in Kumasi, Ghana on a community based survey of inguinal hernia prevalence in rural Ghana.