Kelly Urban received her BA in History from Texas A&M University and her MA from the University of Pittsburgh in 2012. While at Harvard, she was a PhD student at Pittsburgh in residence at Harvard. Her MA thesis analyzed the creation of the state-administered Consejo Nacional de Tuberculosis (National Tuberculosis Council) in Cuba in 1936 and the controversial history of the island’s national sanatorium project, Topes de Collantes. From 2013-2014. She conducted archival research at a variety of sites, including the Cuban Heritage Collection in Miami; the Archivo Nacional and the Museo de Historia de las Ciencias en Cuba “Carlos J. Finlay” in Havana; the Rockefeller Archive Center in New York; and the National Library of Medicine and the Library of Congress in the Washington, D.C. area. Her dissertation, analyzed  how ideas about tuberculosis and tuberculosis treatment(s) changed as a result of ideological and social transformations in Cuba during the first half of the twentieth century. It addressed the question why tuberculosis was not a public health priority prior to the late 1920s despite high mortality rates and why the disease was transformed into a national problem and state responsibility in the mid-1930s. Kelly Urban is also interested in the interaction of the international, national, and local in Cuba’s public health sector. For example, what role did supranational institutions, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, play within Cuba for the development of the national anti-tuberculosis campaign and other public health initiatives? Her dissertation would thus aim to analyze the history of the public health sector in republican Cuba and the intricate political and social processes that shaped its formation.