trans•act fellows

Senior Fellow

J. Robin Moon

Robin is a senior research fellow at marketumbrella.org (New Orleans, LA) to lead its international research initiative on farmers markets and public health. She is working to develop tools and programs that bring research and practice together to measure economic impact, social impact and nutritional impact of markets, and to make them available to all markets. Her research interest lies on traditionally "non-health" policies that impact health, such as urban planning and design, neighborhoods, housing and immigration. Her work brings the social determinants of health framework to the intersection of urban poverty, socioeconomic inequality and social exclusion within rapidly urbanizing societies. Her field work takes the team to the post-Katrina recovery zone, the Brazilian Amazon, Kaiser Permanente markets and elsewhere.

Robin brings a mixture of private sector as well as non-profit experience into the domain of public health and economic development. She served the Korean American Community Foundation (KACF) as the founding Executive Director, where she was in charge of overseeing fundraising and grantmaking activities, as well as program development for the ethnic immigrant community in the New York metropolitan area. Under her leadership, KACF was a grantee of the Ford Foundation on inter-ethnic community development programming. Prior to KACF, Robin was Director of Strategic Planning at World Vision New York, an international humanitarian organization. Her responsibility included the planning and administration of the American Families Assistance Fund™, World Vision’s response to the 9/11 WTC disaster. Prior to World Vision, she worked as Consulting Manager at Extreme Logic (EL), a Silicon Alley technology startup specializing in building web-based company infrastructures for Fortune 500 companies. Prior to that, she was a senior management consultant at Price Waterhouse and PricewaterhouseCoopers, where she provided strategic analysis and change management advice to Fortune 100 companies.

Robin holds a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Chicago, Masters in Public Health and Masters in International Affairs from Columbia University, and she is currently a doctoral candidate at Harvard School of Public Health. Robin is a Charles H. Revson Fellow on the Future of the City of New York in 2006-2007, and the recipient of the Korean American Association of Greater New York Award of Leadership Excellence 2005 and Governor George E. Pataki Award of Excellence for Asian American Heritage Month 2006. She is a Doctoral Candidate at Harvard University's School of Public Health and currently resides in Boston, MA.

Junior Fellow 2010

Jennifer Brady

Jennifer is the 2010 FEED research fellow thanks to a generous partnership between marketumbrella.org and Tulane University’s Prevention Research Center. Originally from the Northeast, Jennifer grew up in New Jersey and attended Rutgers University where she completed a B.S. in Biology. After graduating, she lived in New York for a few years where she worked at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center until she moved to New Orleans in 2007 for the music, the food, mild winters, and backyards. Her previous experience lies in obesity research, working on a clinical trial at Tulane University School of Public Health monitoring the effects of alterations in diet at lowering risk factors for chronic diseases. While working at Tulane, Jennifer began her coursework towards a graduate degree in public health. Now, a full-time student, she is concentrating in Environmental Health, interested in using ecosystems as guides for creating sustainable, equitable, and healthy communities. She believes that deconstructing the industrialized food paradigm and moving towards local production and consumption is central to this goal of improving population and environmental health in a holistic way. Jennifer is fond of hiking and hinky pinkies, and works part-time at the American Cancer Society’s Hope Lodge.

Junior Fellows 2008

Michael J. Rosenkrantz

Mike first became involved with public markets during 1987-88, as the manager of Oakland’s city-owned public market, the ‘Housewives Market’. In August 1987, he attended the first International Public Market Conference at Pike Place Market, and was bitten by the “market bug.” From May 1996-June 2006, Michael was the Coordinator of the New London Farmers’ Market (NLFM) and served as the Secretary and Treasurer. He developed a full range of promotions, including music, dance, and children’s events and cooking demonstrations at the NLFM. In April 2004 Michael participated in the Project for Public Spaces workshop, ‘Creating a Public Market’ and later became the first Market Manager under the Central Market Trust in Lancaster, PA. Working with Market Ventures, Inc. in Salt Lake City and Louisville, Michael researched public markets throughout the country and also interviewed vendors for a potential market. Michael has also assisted with the development of a farmers market as part of a retail food cooperative in New London, CT. Michael’s educational background includes a BA in Political Science, an MA in Sociology and an MBA. Michael was born in Los Angeles and has been a life-long Lakers and Dodgers fan. His parents and two children reside in Southern California.

Fenwick Broyard III

Fenwick is a New Orleans native and recent graduate of the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. His concentration while at Tulane was international health education and communication, but he has also had extensive experience in monitoring and evaluation, both internationally and domestically. In the summer of 2006, with funding from the National Institute of Health, Fenwick conducted a qualitative analysis, in Lima, Peru, of the educational component of the Stop TB program. The conclusions of his research, conducted primarily in the shantytown communities on Lima’s outskirts, were reported directly to the NIH and to the Peruvian host NGO, PRISMA, which later funneled them to the national program. Fenwick has also been very active in the New Orleans area over the last several years since the storm, and has worked with a number of organizations targeting disadvantaged youth as well as families in need. He’s looking forward to adding both a local’s perspective and a public health professional’s eye to trans•act, and is excited by what he sees as the tremendous potential of marketumbrella.org to affect change in his recovering city.

Junior Fellows 2007

Mischa Byruck

Mischa was the US local fellow, grew up in Berkeley, CA and Cambridge, MA, and graduated Columbia College in New York with a B.A. in History. At school he founded both a political action group, People for Peace, as well as the Columbia chapter of 2004ward, an election year voter registration program that placed thirty college students with community organizations in swing states for the summer, who together registered over 10,000 new voters. He moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where he worked first as a community organizer with ACORN, and then as a field reporter for Kansas City's largest bilingual news weekly, Dos Mundos, where he covered the immigration beat and wrote freelance, publishing over 100 articles in less than six months. In 2005, Mischa responded to Hurricane Katrina first as a volunteer in rural Mississippi, and later as co-founder of Emergency Communities, a non-profit disaster relief organization that has since brought 4,000 volunteers to the Gulf Coast, built five community centers, served over 350,000 hot meals, and distributed roughly 1 million pounds of goods to the residents of Southern Louisiana. In his role as Director of Development, Mischa raised over $100,000 in grants and $250,000 in in-kind donations. Since the completion of the fellowship, Mischa has been hired by marketumbrella.org as Forager.

Julia Corrêa-Côrtes

Julia was the Brazilian local fellow, and recently graduated from the Agriculture Engineering program at the University of São Paulo - Escola Superior de Agricultura Luiz de Queiroz (ESALQ/USP). She has worked with water biogeochemistry of Rainforest rivers and streams, at the Laboratory of Isotopic Ecology at “Centro de Energia Nuclear em Agricultura” (CENA/USP) under the guidance of Dr. Plinio Camargo. In the past, she has also worked with Geoprocessing focused in agriculture and environment; and fruits production and management at the Department of Horticulture. She has interned with Saúde e Alegria during February, 2007, for the Forest Economy Department, which has connected her to the trans•act fellowship. Since the completion of the fellowship and graduation, she has come back to Saúde e Alegria as a permanent staff for the Forest Economy Department.