Nikita Japra joined The Rockefeller Foundation in 2015. As an experienced special projects manager, she interpreted health policy interests alongside scientific evidence to shed light on pressing public health issues – ultimately repackaging specialized information for lay audiences across cities, states, and global borders. Most recently, she had worked on the strategic development of the Foundation’s next health initiative.
In her last role, Ms. Japra was responsible for vetting, writing, and producing health and medical coverage across all NBC News platforms — providing editorial guidance for CNBC, MSNBC, and nationally broadcast television on TODAY and NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt. Prior to joining NBC News, Ms. Japra worked across the education, documentary, and broadcast industries – reporting on breaking news and managing program initiatives tied to global health advocacy, medical research, and arts-driven social change. Her interest in the confluence of these areas began during her undergraduate education in International Relations and Writing at Johns Hopkins University, where she was a four-year Bloomberg Scholar.
Ms. Japra holds an M.A. in Media Studies from The New School for Public Engagement, an M.P.H. in Population and Family Health from the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, and graduate certificates in both Media Management and Comparative Effectiveness Outcomes Research (CEOR). She has completed additional coursework in Narrative Medicine and in Risk Analysis at the Columbia University Medical Center and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, respectively.
Authored Content
Sep 13 2018 Blog Post Harmonizing Health Systems to Achieve Health for All This piece is part of our 2018 United Nations General Assembly series. One year ago, after nearly a decade’s commitment to advancing the Universal Health Coverage (UHC) movement, The Rockefeller Foundation’s health team asked itself what it could do in the next 10 years to advance progress on SDG 3 and move closer to making “health […]
May 07 2018 Blog Post Health for All at All Times: Strong Health Systems Pave the Path to UHC In the decade leading up to the 2008 economic recession, global health policy experts increasingly argued that countries needed stronger health systems if they ever hoped to accelerate their hard-won progress fighting specific diseases like HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria – and create a space to address broader health challenges. This realization could not have come […]
Mar 28 2017 Blog Post Transforming Health Systems: Learnings from Four Country Case Studies Just shy of a decade ago, The Rockefeller Foundation broke from a long tradition of focusing its health-related work on disease-specific interventions. Instead, it began to explore the question of how a health system can transform to ensure that all people can enjoy the right to health. At the time, the Foundation’s new emphasis on […]
Mar 16 2017 Blog Post Resilience: A Tool for a New Era of Health Threats If the Ebola crisis in West Africa and the global Zika outbreak taught the world anything, it is that all health systems – regardless of size and available resources – must be better prepared to respond to and recover from threats of all kinds. Not only are today’s health system threats more diverse, their geographic […]
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