MEET THE FOUNDER

As an advocate for social change and a courageous defender of human rights to health, Dr. Holda Gueye created the HALFA foundation in 2012 as a culmination of her work which was started 10 years prior. 
Dr. Gueye was born in Dakar, Senegal, and at the age of two she and her family moved to Potomac, MD in the United States to follow her father, a renowned diplomat of the Senegalese government. Dr. Gueye had very different dreams in those formative years, growing up in the highest tier of society surrounded by wealth, politicians and powerful people.
 
It wasn't until she was 13 years of age, that her father went back to serve in Senegal for two years and took his family with him. It was there that Dr. Gueye's fundamental belief that all people deserve to be treated with dignity, and that lack of access to health impinged on that right, was born.
 
She returned to the United states after living in Cape Verde Islands for a year to follow a new career path as a physician and public health practitioner. Dr. Gueye attended the University of Virginia School of Medicine and the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health where she was honored as an Alfred Sommer Scholar. She completed a rigorous training in obstetrics and Gynecology at the Johns Hopkins hospital ob/Gyn department and has worked in various organizations such as the National cancer institute working on breast cancer genes and The Institute for Genomic Research working on malaria.