Anna is an Honorary Professor of Public Health at LSHTM and was previously Professor of Public Health in Warwick. She is now a Senior Program Officer, Maternal Immunization Product Development and Surveillance at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with a focus on maternal vaccines to prevent disease from Group B Streptococcus.

Anna trained in medicine, and specialized initially in paediatrics. She then developed research interests in neonatal infection, and in particular Group B Streptococcus, working at the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Centre in Kenya, through the University of Oxford. She completed her clinical training in public health, and developed a programme of work at LSHTM, setting up a new Gates-funded research programme in Eastern Ethiopia, in collaboration with Haramaya University, to investigate the specific causes of death in children. She also took up a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellowship to investigate the infectious causes of perinatal death in Kenya and Ethiopia.

Anna subsequently led the research programme of the UK Public Health Rapid Support Team, developing multi-disciplinary research projects in outbreaks of infectious diseases in low-resource settings, and supporting capacity development in the context of outbreak response. During the COVID-19 pandemic she seconded to the Joint Biosecurity Centre where she led an interdisciplinary team to provide public health analytics on disease prevalence, health care, vaccine impact and variants, to inform the national response. From there she moved to Warwick University as Professor of Public Health, and continued to provide scientific advice to the UK Health Security Agency. She moved to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in October 2022 to return, after the pandemic, to her focus on perinatal infection, and in particular, Group B Streptococcus.