Team members

Rebecca King, University of Leeds, United Kingdom

Rebecca is a Lecturer in International Health in the Nuffield Centre for International Health and Development, Leeds Institute of Health Sciences.

Rebecca divides her time between research and teaching. She is the principal investigator on an ESRC-funded project on developing community dialogues to prevent and control antibiotic resistance in Bangladesh, and she is a co-investigator on a Department for International Development-funded programme, COMDIS-HSD, which investigates the most effective ways to deliver health services in low- and middle-income countries. She previously worked on a large trial investigating the most effective ways to promote child survival through community-based interventions in an unstable environment.

Rebecca is the programme leader on the MSc in International Health and leads modules on Key Issues in International Health and Health Promotion.

Rebecca’s PhD is in social anthropology and she has worked for several years in South Asia and West Africa. She brings anthropological insights and expertise in qualitative research methods and in working in complex settings to her teaching and research.

Sally Theobald, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, United Kingdom

Sally has a Masters in Gender and Development, a PhD in Gender, Health and Development and over 15 years’ experience of research on gender and health, gender training and designing and delivering gender mainstreaming approaches.  She has wide ranging experience of designing and implementing gender sensitive qualitative research projects in health and have worked collaboratively on qualitative research projects on HIV, TB, SRH and health systems in Thailand, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Malawi , Ethiopia, Kenya, Yemen and Uganda. She is interested in building and extending understanding of gender, equity and health systems and has wide reaching research, policy and practice networks in this area.

Sassy Molyneux, Kemri-Wellcome Trust, Kenya and Oxford University

Sassy Molyneux is employed by Oxford University and has been working as part of the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme in Kilifi, Kenya, since 1994.  Her work has focused on two main areas: the interface between health systems and households (including treatment seeking behavior, gender relations and affordability of health care); and the interface between health researchers and communities (including informed consent, community engagement, payments and benefits for research participants and communities, and social science ethics).  Her current main interest is in accountability.  She is leading a programme of work aimed at producing new thinking, evidence and recommendations around strengthening community involvement and internal accountability in biomedical research and health delivery in sub-Saharan Africa.

Sarah Ssali, Makarere University, Uganda

Sarah Ssali, holds a Masters in Women and Gender Studies and a PhD in International Health. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies, College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Makerere University. She has experience researching social sciences dimensions of health, gender, identities, minorities and institutions and social transformation.

As a Social Scientist, she has vast experience in ethnographic research methods, with a particularly interest in studying hidden behaviours and non hetero-normative sexual behaviours and aspects of minorities in society. This has seen her conduct research in Social Networks of people living with HIV; gender law and sexuality, legal aspects of circumcision, femininities and masculinities, gender dimensions of health and wellbeing as well as health financing. Hence, she has wide research experience in multiple areas including Gender, HIV, Health, Health Systems, Public Policy and Politics.

Although most of her research has been focused on Uganda, they have been undertaken in research consortia involving countries such Sierra Leone, Cambodia, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, USA, UK, Norway, Sweden and Ireland. In these studies, She has played different roles including PI, co-PI and Junior Investigator. Funders of these studies have included National Institutes of Health (NIH), DFID, Irish AID, Christen Michelson Institute (CMI) Norway. She is currently involved in the Irish AID funded project on strengthening public administration and policy to be effectively responsive to HIV, as well as the DFID funded project on Rebuilding Post Conflict Health Systems (ReBUILD Consortium).

Sreytouch Vong, Independent Consultant, Cambodia

Sreytouch is a health system and public health researcher. She is a principal investigator for ReBUILD project for Health Financing and Human Resource and a team leader of The Career Pathway for Health Workers in Cambodia: the role of gender. She’s been engaging in various area of research: Water Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), nutrition, reproductive health and gender. She is a former staff member of independent policy research institute where she spent more than 5 years exploring qualitative research. She is also an Emerging Voices for 2016 and a former Young Professional Officer of UNDP, Cambodia office. She used to be a peer educator, a trainer for community health education for reproductive health with youth in Cambodia in her initial career of public health.

Sreytouch holds a Master in International Cooperation Policy, majoring in Public Health Management where she has developed her interests in reproductive health and gender (Women’s knowledge, attitude and practice of family planning in rural Cambodia) into her area of research. Her areas of interests are: human resource, gender, WASH and nutrition.

Rosemary Morgan, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, United States

Rosemary Morgan is a health systems and policy qualitative researcher.  She has previously worked on two international health projects: HESVIC – Health System Stewardship and Regulation in Vietnam, India and China, and CHEPSAA – Consortium for Health Policy and Systems Analysis in Africa at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom.  She has also taught and supervised global health and health systems MSc students at the University of Edinburgh, where she was a lecturer with the Global Public Health Unit, and the University of Leeds, where she was a teaching fellow with the Nuffield Centre for International Health and Development.  While at the University of Leeds she was also the Deputy Director of the Centre for Global Development.

She holds a PhD in International Health and Development from the University of Leeds, where she explored HIV/AIDS prevention policy processes within faith-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Tanzania.  In addition, she has worked on consultancy projects for the World Bank and World Health Organization, exploring the role of private hospitals in Asia and the impact of universal health coverage.

Kui Muraya, KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme, Kenya

Kui (Kelly) Muraya is a post-doctoral social scientist at the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme, Kenya with a particular interest in gender & health and social science research more broadly. She has a Bachelor of Arts degree (majoring in Psychology & Anthropology) from the University of Adelaide, Australia, and an Honours Degree in Health Sciences (General Practice) from the same institution. For her Honours Degree she undertook research work on the experiences of intimate partner violence amongst African refugee women who had been resettled in Australia. She obtained her PhD in Public Health and Social Care from the Open University, UK in 2014. Her PhD focused on exploring the interaction between household gender relations and community-based child nutrition interventions; with a focus on the implementation and use of such interventions.

More recently she was a co-principal investigator in a multi-country study exploring gender and leadership within health systems in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. She currently plays a leading role as a social scientist in one study site (Nairobi) of a multi-country study exploring (socioeconomic, cultural and household) factors that contribute to post-hospital discharge mortality in acutely ill undernourished and well-nourished children; with a goal to develop targeted actionable interventions to lower mortality. Her other research interests include qualitative research methods, health systems research, research uptake and communicating research evidence, and translation of research evidence into policy.

Kate Hawkins, Pamoja Communications, United Kingdom

Kate has a strong research uptake, advocacy and communications background and has focused mainly on international development policy, gender, HIV, health systems and sexual and reproductive health and rights. Active in international debates and activism she has worked with multilaterals, bilateral donors, researchers and the non-governmental sector on policy related issues.

In recent years Kate has had more of a focus on research communications and the process by which evidence is translated into policy and practice. Her skills include; project management, strategic planning for impact and effective communication, website development, the translation of research into communications products targeted at multiple audiences, editing and proofreading, policy analysis, communications training, meeting design and facilitation and documenting programmes, processes and meetings. Kate sits on the advisory boards of the Comic Relief Health Systems Programme, RESYST, the Pleasure Project, and the IDS Sexuality and Development Programme. She is the Secretary of the Health Systems Global Thematic Working Group on Community Health Workers.

Linda Waldman, Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, United Kingdom

Linda Waldman is the Director of Teaching and Learning and a Fellow in the Health and Nutrition Cluster at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex. She has twenty years research experience as a social anthropologist working in Africa, the UK and south Asia.  Her research brings together science, technology, health, environment and policy with particular interests in gender, ethnicity, sexuality, identity and other expressions of belonging or difference.  She has collaborated on multi-partner, interdisciplinary research and policy initiatives focusing on broadly on environmental health, including asbestos-related diseases, peri-urban sustainability, and zoonotic disease.

Helen Elsey, University of Leeds, United Kingdom

Helen Elsey is Associate Professor of Public Health in the Nuffield Centre for International Health and Development, University of Leeds. Her research interest lies in gender and equity in relation to health risk and behaviour and the development and evaluation of complex public health interventions to improve the health of disadvantaged populations. Her current research focuses on urban health in low income countries; particularly in improving the collection and use of data that represents the needs of the urban poor and in developing interventions to improve health and reduce injuries in urban slums. Helen is engaged in work with people with tuberculosis in South Asia, developing interventions for tobacco cessation and to improve psycho-social well-being.