Megumi Asaba is a doctoral student in the Department of Global Community Health and Behavioral Sciences in School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at Tulane University, and her scholarship explores human-centered design approaches to health research, focusing on maternal, newborn, and child health and nutrition in low income populations, with an emphasis on cultural and social factors that impact outcomes in community settings. Asaba also has experiences in working in countries such as Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. More specifically, prior to her enrollment at Tulane University, she worked as a program manager in several maternal and child health related projects in Afghanistan and Pakistan with Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), including routine immunization, polio eradication, TB control, and health system strengthening. Asaba's expertise, gained through her work in international health, includes developing and evaluating health interventions, policy planning, innovative public-private health financing, program management and administration, design thinking, leadership and capacity development training, and formative research. Asaba’s most significant work up to this point was to formulate and lead a technical project of launching Maternal and Child Health Handbook in Afghanistan, which included needs assessment, project designing, and coordination of an inter-agency technical committee to develop the handbook, training curricula and implementation plan. The project successfully introduced the handbook into the existing health system in two pilot districts in the country, and the follow-up evaluation was published in a peer-reviewed academic journal in 2019.