Kara Palamountain, MBA

Kara Palamountain is the President of the Northwestern Global Health Foundation.  She is also a Research Assistant Professor at the Kellogg School of Management and the Executive Director of the school’s Global Health Initiative (GHI).  The GHI is currently working in partnership with NU’s Center for Innovation in Global Health Technologies (CIGHT) to develop and produce affordable HIV diagnostics for resource limited settings.
Ms. Palamountain has played a crucial role in identifying the more strategic aspects of introducing diagnostics developed by CIGHT.  She has managed over 50 Kellogg field research teams conducting market entry analysis in Botswana, Brazil, Cambodia, China, India, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam and Zambia. 

Ms. Palamountain is a co-investigator on a cost-effectiveness project at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda funded by the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health. Ms. Palamountain has also served as an external reviewer for various projects under consideration by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a peer reviewer for Grand Challenges Canada.  She also authored University Leadership for Innovation in Global Health and HIV/AIDS Diagnostics recently published in Global Public Health -- an International Journal for Research, Policy and Practice.

Prior to her work at the Northwestern Global Health Foundation and at Kellogg, Kara worked as a management consultant in Deloitte's Healthcare practice for over six years (1998-2002; 2004-2006) where she helped clients identify and implement initiatives to become more operationally and cost effective.