Madeline Rita

About Madeline

(updated 2/2019) Maddie Rita is spending her Luce Year at the Reproductive Health Association of Cambodia (RHAC), a leading local non-governmental organization with over twenty years of pioneering experience in service provision, education, and advocacy for sexual and reproductive health and rights. Maddie’s work at RHAC spans several project teams and includes resource mobilization, development of learning tools on intersectional feminism in the Cambodian context (in collaboration with the Youth Health team), and coordination of the 10 th Asia Pacific Conference on Reproductive and Sexual Health and Rights, which will be held in Siem Reap in 2020. 
Maddie graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Virginia’s Global Studies Program Class of 2018. During her undergraduate career, she had a variety of field-based public health research experiences.  As an intern at Asociacion de Comadronas del Area Mam, a Maya birth center in rural Guatemala, she documented medicinal practices of traditional birth attendants. She took part in the UVA Public Health Field School, a community-based participatory research project that qualitatively analyzed circumcision practices and HIV prevalence amongst Xhosa men in Khayelitsha, South Africa. Maddie also co-authored a paper on transportation barriers for American epilepsy patients that was presented at the 9 th International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics in July 2017. Maddie was a medical scribe for the University Hospital’s Emergency Department and an organic chemistry teaching assistant. In the fall of 2017, she taught a semester-long seminar on reproductive healthcare. Her volunteer engagements included serving as Vice Chair and Investigator for the University Judiciary Committee and as a GED tutor for incarcerated students at the Albemarle Charlottesville Regional Jail. In her free time, Maddie enjoys running, climbing, and reading and writing poetry, some of which has been published in the  Virginia Literary Review . These days, she is also likely to be found in one of the markets near her apartment eating delicious Cambodian snacks. She hopes to attend medical school following the completion of her time abroad.