Beth West
Director, Nuvance Health Patricia A. Tietjen, MD Teaching Academy
Beth West joined Nuvance Health in June 2021 as Director of the newly founded Patricia A. Tietjen, MD Teaching Academy. Beth completed her undergraduate education at Fordham University and her Masters in international education from the SIT Graduate Institute (formerly School for International Training) in Brattleboro, VT. Beth has over fifteen years of international and intercultural education program development and management experience, including her work with the William J. Fulbright program, as Director of the Centro de Consejeria Educativa (EducationUSA Advising Center- Bogota, Colombia), founding Director of Exchange Programs at the Prepa Ibero at the Universidad Iberoamericana (Mexico City, Mexico), Director of CIEE Guanajuato (Guanajuato, Mexico), and founding Director of Indiana University’s Mexico Global Gateway at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM-Mexico City, Mexico). Prior to joining Nuvance Health, Beth served in the CDC Foundation’s COVID-19 Crisis Corps as a bilingual intercultural Health Educator working with communities in Hartford, CT. She has diverse experience in non-profit humanitarian aid program management, solidarity based-community development projects, intercultural teaching and learning, and creative partnerships linking volunteerism and international education within Latin and South America and the United States. She speaks Spanish fluently, and lived in Mexico for 8 years and Colombia for 3 years. Currently, Beth is a doctoral student, pursuing an Ed.D. in Educational Leadership with a concentration in International Education at the University of Bridgeport and is a certified Qualified Administrator of the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) Assessment. Beth is an active member of the Housatonic Friends Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).
Bulat A. Ziganshin, MD, PhD
The Nuvance Health/UVMLCOM Global Health Program Associate Director
Dr. Bulat Ziganshin is an Associate Research Scientist at the Department of Surgery, Section of Cardiac Surgery, Yale University School of Medicine, and is the Research Director of the Aortic Institute of Yale-New Haven Hospital. He is also serving as an Associate Editor of the AORTA Journal.
Currently completing a PhD program in Genetics and Development at Columbia University (New York, NY) where he studies the genetic basis of thoracic aortic disease, Dr. Ziganshin has published over 150 scientific manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals, as well as 17 chapters in textbooks, and co-authored five drug reference books.
Dr. Ziganshin also has a long-lasting interest in global health. For seven years, he served as the President of the Tatarstan Medical Students’ Association, an associate member of the International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations. During 2010-2011, he served as a member of the Student Advisory Committee of the Global Health Educational Consortium. He has served as the Director for the Global Health Elective Program for students at the American University of the Caribbean and Ross University School of Medicine, and more recently as the Associate Program Director at the Nuvance Health Global Health Program.