I work in partnership with the Centre for Sexual Health and HIV/AIDS (CESHHAR) Zimbabwe on a variety of projects aiming to characterise HIV epidemiology, access to prevention, and care among female sex workers in Zimbabwe. I am the LSHTM’s liason to the Key Populations Working Group of the Measurement and Surveillance of HIV (MeSH) Consortium and lead the HIV Prevention Frameworks work package, and am also engaged in assessing peer network sampling strategies, using routinely collected programme data sources, methods to estimate population size and estimate extrapolation methodologies.

I am a Co-Investigator on the TRANSFORM study with Sigma Research, the Wits Reproductive Health Institute, Partners for Health and Development in Africa and the University of Manitoba. We aim to understand the HIV prevention needs of gay men and MSM in Johannesburg and Nairobi. This project was informed by our initial work with the International HIV/AIDS Alliance to map out initiatives in HIV prevention and rights for gay men and MSM in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe and appraise their SHARP programme.

 I have a particular interest in social network analysis, and my PhD research examined how friendship networks of young women in rural South Africa might influence their HIV risk, via connections to sexual partners and normative influence on sexual behaviours. Social networks are also important to health promotion among socially marginalised and stigmatised groups, and in common research methods leveraging peer relationships for recruitment, such as Respondent Driven Sampling.