I spend my time between academic research and technical support to humanitarian health actors, including UN agencies and NGOs, at local, national and global levels. My research includes a range of studies focused on health policy and systems research to improve women's, children's and adolescent health in under-resourced and humanitarian crises settings.

I lead qualitative and mixed methods research on health financing arrangements and service delivery for sexual and reproductive health interventions in Northern Uganda, and mental health and preterm birth interventions in Lebanon as part of the RECAP and GOAL projects. 

In the Exemplars project, I am the health policy and systems research lead in 7 low- and middle-income countries with colleagues from 12 organisations.

In spring 2020, I was part of founding group of the COVID-19 Humanitarian Platform, which was set up with an aim of helping humanitarian actors make evidence-based decisions during the pandemic. I have since conducted research on the impact of COVID-19 on maternal, newborn and child health in humanitarian settings for Unicef (report available here); and am currently leading research on assessing adaptations and innovations that humanitarian actors have made to the healthresponse during COVID-19 with funding from ODI/ALNAP.

My previous work has included conducting research as part of the BRANCH consortium on assessing the implementation of key health interventions for women and children in Syria, which was published here. I also led a study on analysing the implementation of key interventions for women, children and adolescents in 10 conflict-affected countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America which was published here in the first Lancet series on women's and children's health in conflict settings in 2021.

In Afghanistan, I worked as part of an international team of academics to revise the country’s basic package of health services, with my role focused on leading a national- and subnational-level health system assessment with a view to assessing progress toward achieving universal health coverage targets.

I have also led a series of evidence reviews of sexual and reproductive health interventions, incudling for young people, in humanitarian settings.  

My research experience has made me keenly aware of inequities present in current research structures and health responses in humanitarian contexts. My vision is to develop and operationalise more respectful and gender-transformative ways of working in humanitarian settings and on sensitive issues (e.g. sexual and reproductive health). Working with humanitarian actors and academics, I led the first guidance document on conducting feminist and decolonial research in forced displacement settings, and am aiming to test and refine the checklist we proposed in my research.