Ms Rebecca Penzias
Research Fellow
United Kingdom
Rebecca is a Health Systems Researcher with the multi-national NEST360 alliance. NEST360 (Newborn Essential Solutions and Technologies) is a multi-partner, collaboration in four African countries (Malawi, Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria) to innovate, implement and evaluate a package to improve hospital care for small and sick newborns in Africa. More information can be found at https://www.nest360.org.
Rebecca's work focuses on health facility readiness data, database management, and data quality. She is currently pursuing a PhD at LSHTM with a focus on advancing measurement of standards-based service readiness for inpatient small and sick newborn care in Malawi, Kenya, Tanzania, and Nigeria.
Previously, she received a MSc (Reproductive and Sexual Health Research) from LSHTM and a BA (Sociology and French) from Boston University, USA. Prior to joining LSHTM, she worked with the Community Asthma Initiative at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Rebecca's work focuses on health facility readiness data, database management, and data quality. She is currently pursuing a PhD at LSHTM with a focus on advancing measurement of standards-based service readiness for inpatient small and sick newborn care in Malawi, Kenya, Tanzania, and Nigeria.
Previously, she received a MSc (Reproductive and Sexual Health Research) from LSHTM and a BA (Sociology and French) from Boston University, USA. Prior to joining LSHTM, she worked with the Community Asthma Initiative at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Affiliations
Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology and International Health
Faculty of Epidemiology and Population Health
Teaching
Rebecca is a tutor on the MSc Reproductive and Sexual Health Research course, the Statistics for Epidemiology and Population Health (STEPH) module, Health Data Management (HDM) module, and the distance learning module Statistics for Epidemiology (EPM102). She also supervises MSc summer projects.
Research
Rebecca’s research interests focus on measurement of implementation programmes aimed at improving child health in low resource settings with a particular focus on research that has practical implications for implementers, including governments, policy makers, and other health systems actors.
Her previous research includes quantitative and qualitative projects on sexual minority women’s health, a community intervention to manage childhood asthma, and the experiences of transgender and gender non-conforming adults in emergency medicine.
Her previous research includes quantitative and qualitative projects on sexual minority women’s health, a community intervention to manage childhood asthma, and the experiences of transgender and gender non-conforming adults in emergency medicine.
Research Area
Neonatal health
Maternal health
Reproductive health
Sexual and reproductive health
Child health
Perinatal health
Evaluation
Health systems
Equity
Quality improvement
Epidemiology
Implementation science
Country
Tanzania
Kenya
Malawi
Nigeria
United States
United Kingdom
Region
Euro area
Sub-Saharan Africa (developing only)
Sub-Saharan Africa (all income levels)
North America
Selected Publications
Primary health facility readiness to care for infants under six months at risk of poor growth and development: A HHFA-based survey
2024
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Evaluating service readiness for small and sick newborns to inform tracking of the ENAP coverage target: Baseline results of a health facility assessment from 65 facilities in four African countries
2023
Personal Phone Calls Lead to Decreased Rates of Missed Appointments in an Adolescent/Young Adult Practice.
2019
Pediatric quality & safety
Community Asthma Initiative: Cost Analyses using Claims Data from a Medicaid Managed Care Organization.
2019
The Journal of asthma : official journal of the Association for the Care of Asthma
