Sima Berendes joined the Faculty of Epidemiology and Population Health in 2019. As a member of the Intervention Design and Evaluation Group she supported the work on the Safetxt trial, an NIHR-funded trial of a safer sex intervention delivered by mobile phone. She also co-organised a series of pan-European and local webinars by the Vaccine Confidence Project. Most recently, Sima has been principal investigator of the VIP-IDEAL study, a qualitative study on vaccination in pregnancy, funded by a Wellcome ISSF pump priming grant. Since 2023, Sima has been working in the Clinical Trials Unit Global Health Trials Group in the area of emergency care and maternal health.

Sima has a medical and public health background with more than ten years of clinical, research, teaching, and charitable work experience in Germany, France, the US, UK, Burkina Faso, Malawi, Libya and other African countries.

After obtaining her medical research doctorate at the University of Freiburg in Germany and her MPH degree at Johns Hopkins University in the USA, Sima worked for two years as a study physician and coordinator of HIV/AIDS-related clinical trials at the College of Medicine/ Johns Hopkins University Research project in Blantyre in Malawi.

She then moved to the UK, where she joined the International Public Health Department at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM). At LSTM her research included identifying evidence for the comparative quality of private versus public health care and the effectiveness of strategies to improve the quality of care in low- and middle-income countries. Sima was also involved in an EU-funded project to support the Ministry of Health in Libya to develop its first National HIV/AIDS strategy. This included the conduct of biological and behavioural surveillance surveys among key populations in Tripoli and Benghazi, Libya, using the method of respondent-driven sampling. Sima contributed to research using lot-quality assurance sampling to assess the coverage and quality of health care services by different providers at national and sub-national levels in Nigeria, Uganda and South-Sudan.

Prior to joining LSHTM, Sima also supported the development of a distance learning course in Global Health at Imperial College London, and assisted SESH Global (Social Entrepreneurship to Spur Health) in the conduct of a systematic review and linked Crowdsourcing For Health project on decentralised diagnostic testing for infectious diseases.