Esther Jagwer is a senior at Amherst College majoring in Neuroscience on the pre-medical track. Growing up in Serowe, a village in Botswana, she experienced firsthand how healthcare access, though widely available, often fell short of specialized services such as behavioral health and HIV-related care. Witnessing the everyday impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on her community shaped her interest in global mental health, particularly the intersections of HIV, mental health, and sexual and reproductive health among youth in low- and middle-income countries.
This summer, under the supervision of Dr. Ohemaa Poku, she worked on the Safe Haven Project, which provides youth-friendly psychotherapy services to adolescents living with HIV through a peer-delivered framework at clinics and organizations across Botswana. Her responsibilities included contributing to manuscripts through literature reviews and writing on topics such as youth living with HIV, mental health stigma, and sexual and reproductive health (SRH) stigma. She also independently conducted dyadic and thematic qualitative analysis on a database of interviews with children, young adults, and parents, examining barriers and facilitators to youth-friendly mental health and SRH services in Botswana transcribing interviews, developing open codes, and harmonizing them using matrices for the first time.
Esther is grateful for the opportunity to contribute to research in the community that shaped her path, while deepening her commitment to global mental health. She hopes to continue this work as she pursues a career in medicine and global health research.