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Obesity specialist, agribusiness executive named White House fellows

Sara Bleich, a physician known for her research on obesity prevention and Erik Malmstrom, a Cargill executive who worked in Africa and founded an investment firm that specializes in frontier markets, are among the 2015-2016 class of White House fellows whose appointments were announced Monday by the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships.

The fellows were chosen from diverse backgrounds and professions, the White House said, and because they have demonstrated a commitment to public service and leadership.

The White House program was created in 1964 by President Lyndon B. Johnson to give promising American leaders “firsthand, high-level experience with the workings of the federal government, and to increase their sense of participation in national affairs,” according to a White House news release.

The program is designed to broaden knowledge of leadership, policy formulation, and current affairs, and participants also take part in service projects throughout their year in Washington. Throughout its history, the program has fostered leaders in government, business, law, media, medicine, education, diplomacy and the military.

Sara Bleich
Sara Bleich
Sara Bleich will be placed in the Agriculture Department during her fellowship.

A resident of Baltimore, she has been an associate professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she has published more than 75 papers in journals of public health and medicine and is known for her research on obesity prevention.

Before Hopkins, Bleich worked as a research associate at the RAND Corporation and The Measurement Group.

Bleich has received several awards: “Most outstanding abstract” at the International Conference on Obesity, “best research manuscript” in the journal Obesity, and first prize for “excellence in public interest communication” from the Frank Public Interest Conference.

She also is the recipient of several competitive grant awards: a career development award from the National Institutes of Health and multiple healthy eating research grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

She received a bachelor of arts in psychology from Columbia University and a doctoral degree in health policy from Harvard University.

Erik Malmstrom
Erik Malmstrom
Erik Malmstrom, of West Hartford, Conn., will be placed with the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative during his fellowship.

Malmstrom was a business development manager for Cargill Grain and Oilseed Supply Chain Mideast and Africa at Cargill, Inc.

He was responsible for sourcing, analyzing, and managing investment opportunities across Africa, including his unit’s largest acquisition, an oilseed crush plant in Zambia.

Before working at Cargill, he served as an Army infantry officer, graduating from Army Ranger and Airborne schools and earning the Bronze Star for outstanding combat service as a rifle platoon leader in northeastern Afghanistan.

Subsequently, he worked as an impact investor, strategy consultant, and independent researcher in Afghanistan, Egypt, Haiti, and other transitional economies before co-founding CrossBoundary LLC, an investment advisory firm working in frontier markets.

He has been a contributing writer to The New York Times, term member on the Council on Foreign Relations, and co-president of Harvard Alumni for Agriculture.

He received a bachelor of arts from the University of Pennsylvania and a joint master of business administration and master of public policy from the Harvard Business and Kennedy schools, and was a Rotary ambassadorial scholar at Makerere University in Uganda.