Caroline Carrasco

Caroline Carrasco was raised in Mooresville, North Carolina by Peruvian parents from Lima and Ocobamba. As a child of immigrants, she grew up navigating Latin American, Andean Quechua, and Southern culture simultaneously. Her multicultural identity enabled her global perspective of world issues, which informs her belief that everyone, regardless of the place or condition they were born in, deserves access to healthcare, a healthy environment, and opportunities to thrive. This belief motivates her pursuit of a career in international development.

Caroline is proud to have been educated by North Carolina public schools from kindergarten through college. She attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Morehead-Cain Scholar, graduating with a BSPH in Health Policy and Management from the Gillings School of Global Public Health and a minor in Sustainability Studies. The scholarship enabled her to spend summers working on global health projects. She worked to increase food security and improve the health of an HIV discordant community at The AIDS Support Organization in Jinja, Uganda; worked on Yaws and Buruli Ulcer eradication at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland; and contributed to evaluation reports for the Health Policy Project at a global health consulting firm in D.C.

After graduating, she worked in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam as a Princeton in Asia Fellow with a road safety NGO aiming to reduce road deaths in six countries internationally. Caroline then spent almost two years in San Francisco, California, where she worked for a healthcare research firm to build tools for the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. After working domestically, she moved to Arusha, Tanzania where she worked with an L3C to equip local social entrepreneurs to provide access to clean and affordable water to communities that would otherwise drink boiled or untreated water.

Caroline will study at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where she will earn a Master of Science in Public Health in International Health with a concentration on Social and Behavioral Interventions. In her free time, Caroline enjoys film photography, curating music playlists, keeping up with the latest sneaker drops, and reading books by civil rights and immigrant activists. Caroline is honored and grateful to be a part of the 2018 class of Payne Fellows. She is excited to develop the expertise for a successful career as a Health Officer in the USAID Foreign Service.