Alumni Spotlight: Zack Fowler AB’16

During his first year at Duke, Zack Fowler AB’16 attended a dinner for his Global Health FOCUS seminar where DGHI professor Sherryl Broverman, Ph.D., talked about her work with WISER, a community organization supporting girls’ education in rural Kenya. It was a talk that would shape his career in profound ways.

Founded in 2010 by Broverman and two colleagues, WISER operates a secondary school for girls in Muhiri Bay, Kenya, a region where fewer than 10 percent of girls go to college. Fowler was impressed and sought out ways to get involved, eventually becoming president of WISER’s campus advocacy group, which helped raise awareness of WISER’s mission and funds for its programs. Through his work with the school, he also began to see how access to education can offer girls a way out of cycles of poverty and poor health.

“I quickly realized that adolescent girls were central to many holistic global health questions,” says Fowler, who is now co-CEO of Amplify Girls, a network of 40 community-driven organizations working to advance girls’ education and well-being across East and Southern Africa. 

After graduating in 2016 with majors in global health and cultural anthropology, Fowler continued working with WISER, serving as the organization’s U.S.-based executive director. He left in 2022 to become head of strategic partnerships for Amplify Girls, which works with organizations like WISER in five African countries. He was named co-CEO of the organization, along with Kenya-based human rights advocate Lucy Minayo, in May 2024.

While WISER focuses on local impact, Amplify Girls takes a multinational approach, seeking to provide community organizations with tools and resources to advance their work. One of its flagship projects is the Adolescent Girls Agency Survey, a psychometric tool that Fowler says will give small organizations the rigorous data they need to evaluate their impact.

"It's a project I'm particularly passionate about,” he says, emphasizing the survey’s potential to revolutionize data accessibility for grassroots organizations.

Global health wasn’t Fowler’s original goal when he started at Duke. He was more interested in genetics and was involved in laboratory research on genetic birth defects. “I was working with a medical genetics lab at Duke, looking at the relationship between various defects, particularly spina bifida, and nutrition,” he says.

But when Fowler noticed that many of the samples they studied were from patients in countries outside the U.S., he grew curious about the larger implications of the research. 

“I wanted to know more about where these samples came from and the local ramifications of our research,” he says. “[I was asking] questions like, how do mothers respond to having a child with a birth defect? Is there community stigma? These questions weren’t being addressed in the genetics lab, which led me to discover global health.”

Fowler traveled to Kenya for his undergraduate thesis research on the relationships between reproductive health outcomes and school nutrition. He also fondly recalls working with peers in Trent Hall on a landscape analysis for their capstone project.

 “Dr. Eric Green stopped by to discuss our projects, which was incredibly inspiring,” he recalls.

Fowler now lives in Seattle with his spouse, Madelaine Katz AB’16, whom he met at Duke. Katz, who also majored in cultural anthropology and global health, is a program specialist with GlobalGiving. 

 “We've been partners for 12 years, and she's also involved in global health forums. It’s wonderful to share this passion with her,” Fowler says.