I am a passionate social scientist with expertise in using a wide range of evaluation methods to examine factors that can affect the delivery of immunisation programmes in low, middle, and high-income countries. The initial catalyst for my interest in vaccination was being tasked as a nurse to support primary health care programmes in Haiti in the early 1990s. Subsequently, I worked at a paediatric clinical vaccine trials unit in Oxford, then I completed a PhD at LSHTM. I gained expertise in medical anthropology, ethics, and public health during my doctoral studies. My thesis (fieldwork linked to malaria and rotavirus vaccine research conducted in western Kenya) contributed to debates in ethics around the nature and goals of community engagement, and the social value and practice of solidarity in bio-medical research conducted in resource-limited settings. My current research activities are outlined below, and I am one of the LSHTM Vaccine Centre co-directors (https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/research/centres/vaccine-centre).
Affiliations
Centres
Teaching
I am the LSHTM Programme Director for the MSc in Health Policy, Planning and Financing (HPPF), which is a programme offered in partnership with the London School of Economics. Additional teaching activities include; seminar leader on the ‘Health Policy: Process and Power’ module, marking on the distance learning (DL) ‘Medical Anthropology in Public Health’ module and supervising MSc HPPF student's dissertations. Past teaching roles include; module organiser for the distance DL ‘Principles of Social Research’ module and deputy module organiser for the distance. I am currently supervising 3 PhD and 1 DrPH students.
Research
My research investigates the interface between immunisation delivery systems and public engagement with and experience of accessing vaccination services. I have a particular interest in the development and theory-informed evaluation of interventions and service delivery improvements aimed to address vaccine inequalities in a wide range of settings.
I am a co-investigator in the NIHR funded Health Protection Research Unit in Vaccines and Immunisation, which is a partnership between the UK Health Security Agency, LSHTM, the University of Cambridge and University College London. This unit conducts multi-disciplinary research to inform the English national immunisation programme. Through my research as part of this unit and additional research grants (China - NIHR EPIC, Ethiopia & Uganda – 3ie International Initiative for Impact Evaluation) I have gained expertise in: i) conducting theory-informed mixed methods evaluations of interventions aimed at increasing vaccine uptake and addressing vaccine inequalities (e.g. electronic-consent for adolescent immunisation, data informed community engagement strategies), ii)co-production methods aimed at involving intended beneficiaries in the design stages of interventions (e.g. educational package about human papillomavirus vaccine for adolescents), iii) using qualitative research and ethnography (e.g. examining minority groups experience of the COVID pandemic) to inform immunisation policy and programme delivery.
Selected Publications
