Social scientist and public health practitioner with more than 15 years’ experience of working in collaborative research, education, management and consultancy.
Working across ARISE, COUNTDOWN and K4D consortia at LSTM to strengthen health systems through the application of co-production research approaches, capacity strengthening and multilateral knowledge exchange. Experienced in implementation science, co-designing innovative participatory methods and methodologies, delivering and evaluating impactful collaborative equitable research with communities and within district, regional and national health systems in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Latin America and the UK.
Has worked collaboratively with government, not for profit agencies, global health partnerships, research institutions, and NGOs delivering high quality outputs including peer reviewed publications, national strategy documents, policy briefs, training manuals, learning packs and multimedia. Recent research focus is on addressing power differentials in co-production research and sharing lessons from multidisciplinary research that connects citizens with science.
Co-founder of the podcast ‘Connecting citizens to Science’.
Current projects and grants
K4D
I am a research officer with the K4D programme which provides a range of learning activities, evidence, and knowledge services primarily for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) but also across other UK government departments as well as for other development partners, strengthening the systematic use of learning and evidence to develop policy and programming that meets development challenges. K4D develops interdisciplinary ‘learning journeys’ using a range of approaches to share knowledge and experience across UK government and with other development partners. The research helpdesk service and emerging issue reports provide high quality syntheses of evidence and knowledge to support policy and programme work and future thinking.
ARISE: Accountability and Responsiveness in Informal Settlements for Equity
I am a research associate and co-investigator for the GCRF Accountability for Informal urban Equity Hub (ARISE) (2019-2024). Within ARISE, I support social science research in Sierra Leone, Kenya, Bangladesh, and India to address the intractable development challenge of ill-health, inequity and insecurity in informal urban settlements. Our research works in partnership with people living and working in informal settlements, through the application of co-production principles to improve civil participation, accountability, and wellbeing. I lead a work package (with hub partners) focused on developing the capacities of co-researchers living and working in informal settlements, academic researchers and implementing organisations, across four countries, to meaningfully participate in community based participatory action research (CBPR). This includes knowledge exchange and learning which has led to a new Competency evaluation framework for co-production research. This and other outputs are shared on our webpage ‘CBPR corner’.
COUNTDOWN: Calling time on Neglected Tropical Diseases
Countdown is a 7-year multidisciplinary research consortium implementation research funded by UKAID within the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development office (FCDO). COUNTDOWN brings together researchers from a range of backgrounds, policy makers, health care providers and implementation research specialists from Cameroon, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, the UK and the USA. The consortia are dedicated to investigating cost-effective, scaled-up and sustainable solutions that are necessary to control and eliminate the most common NTDs. I work with a team of social scientists in Nigeria applying participatory action research and quality improvement cycles to address equity in Mass Drug Administration (MDA) and to co-design a new care package to diagnose and treat women and girls with Female Genital Schistosomiasis at primary health care level.
GOBLAR - Identify, progress and monitor improved urban health governance, leadership, and accountability in Guatemala
Funded by the Directors Catalyst Fund, this research applied a participatory action research approach with urban municipal actors, as co-researchers, to develop an online innovative tool to systematically identify, progress and monitor improved governance, leadership, accountability and multisectoral policies and practices within Guatemala- known as GOBLAR (Spanish abbreviation). The process to identify governance performance is participatory and promotes the involvement of various sectors and community leaders by encouraging dialogue and coordination to define the status, develop improvement actions and monitor their progress. Through various processes, the tool displays the results of the evaluations made in different municipalities in a graphic and interactive way on the map of the country. Through different filters the tool can show results specific to each municipality and domain, which facilitates understanding of current performance and provides a route for decision making. The project works in collaboration with Guillermo Hegel from the Institute of Nutrition of Central America and Panama (INCAP) in Guatemala.
Other relevant expertise
Consultancies
2021: WHO Health workforce planning unit to undertake research on HRH (Human Resources for Health) Governance
2021: LINKS (WHO, CDC Foundation and Resolve to Save Lives) Community based, patient-centered strategies to improve hypertension control in rural Guatemala
2019: Health Systems Global and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. HSR2018 discussions on Universal Health Coverage, Primary Health Care and the role of the Private Sector
2019: UNDP Gender Dimensions of neglected tropical diseases.
2018: The ReBUILD consortium, LSTM. Development of a policy brief: Responding to humanitarian crises in ways that strengthen longer-term health systems: What do we know?
Memberships
Steering Committee Member for the International Collaboration for Participatory Health Research
UK Participatory Research Network
Social Science Approaches for Research and Engagement in Health Policy and Systems (SHAPES)
Teaching
Participatory research, Primary health care, gender and health, community health systems and health systems strengthening