I have 18 years’ experience in conducting research and training at the intersection of gender, health and development across low-middle- and high-income settings. My areas of expertise include gender-based violence, sexual exploitation of children and adolescents and intervention development. I am Deputy Director of the Gender, Violence and Health Centre which is a WHO Collaboration Centre (https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/research/centres-projects-groups/gender-violence-health-centre). My work draws on social theory, social psychology and feminist theories such as gender theory, social norms and power analysis. My experience with research and programme evaluation designs includes cluster RCTs with nested qualitative methods; mixed-methods quasi-experimental evaluations; and feasibility studies.

Current projects:

I currently head the Learning Initiative on Norms, Exploitation and Abuse (LINEA) project (https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/research/centres-projects-groups/linea), a global learning initiative on social norms and sexual exploitation of children and adolescents.  This initiative which started 6 years ago under the direction of Lori Heise, is currently working with Tanzanian partners in the development and evaluation of a multi-component, gender synchronised intervention using a social norms approach to prevent age-disparate transactional sex through an evidence-based, user-centred, iterative design focusing on girls, men and the community.

I am the principal investigator of the Romantic Jealousy, Infidelity and IPV Collaborative that brings together partners from around the globe to understand the pathways of association linking infidelity and romantic jealousy to IPV. As part of this collaboration we conducted the first global systematic review on the association of romantic jealousy and intimate partner violence against women (Pichon et. al 2020).

I led the first systematic review of the effects of cash and in-kind transfers on IPV in LMIC (Buller et. al. 2018), the results of which shaped the global research agenda and policy in the field of violence against women and girls. This work contributed to the formation of the Cash Transfer and IPV Research Collaborative (https://www.ifpri.org/project/cash-transfer-and-intimate-partner-violence-research-collaborative). Led by IFPRI, this initiative includes LSHTM, UNC, UNICEF—Innocenti, and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and aims to advance the research agenda linking cash transfers and IPV, to effectively and safely leverage cash programming for IPV prevention among poor and vulnerable women in LMIC settings.