Meet the Researchers Asking Whether We've Been Looking in the Wrong Direction

HaEun Lee, PhD

Engaging men in family planning through partnership, not persuasion 

"Reproductive health is relational. When we engage men and women as a team rather than pitting them against each other, everyone benefits."

Adapting intervention to context 

Lee is piloting a male-engaged family planning intervention in Nakivale Refugee Settlement, Uganda—adapting evidence-based approaches to a context where displacement, trauma, and uncertain futures shape reproductive decisions. Her work recognizes that family planning in crisis settings requires different conversations than in stable communities. 

The intervention brings couples together to strengthen communication, deepen mutual understanding, and reframe family planning as a shared decision — not a burden women carry alone. By engaging men in group settings, it reshapes norms around gender, power, and reproduction — without dismissing the cultural values families hold. 

Building through exploration 

Lee's phased approach—exploration, adaptation, pilot testing—models how interventions should travel across contexts. Rather than implementing a pre-packaged program, her team learns from the community first, adapts thoughtfully, then tests rigorously. It's how global health should work.

Eliza Steinberg

Working with midwives, nurses, and patients across low- and middle-income country settings 

"If we want to save mothers' lives globally, we need to build tools with—not for—those most directly impacted." 

Participatory innovation for maternal survival 

Steinberg is co-developing a device to quantify uterine blood loss in low- and middle-income countries, where postpartum hemorrhage remains a leading cause of preventable maternal death. But the innovation isn't just technical—it's in how the device is designed. 

Her team isn't just testing a new device — they are building it with the people who will use it. Working alongside midwives, nurses, and patients, they started by listening. Semi-structured interviews become design dialogues, with the prototype on the table as a catalyst for honest conversation about what actually works. The result is a device taking shape around Ghanaian healthcare realities from the ground up — clinically meaningful, contextually grounded, and built to be used. 

Closing the gap by changing where design begins 

Many maternal health technologies are developed in well-resourced settings — designed around assumptions of continuous electricity, stable infrastructure, and controlled clinical environments — then expected to perform in places where none of those conditions are guaranteed. Health workers are left to manage the gap. Steinberg's team inverts that model entirely: build for constrained settings first, and you create tools that work everywhere. It's a blueprint for what medical device development looks like when equity isn't an afterthought — it's the starting point.

Abu Hasan Sajili 

Proving community health workers drive vaccine equity 

"The last mile of vaccine delivery isn't about logistics—it's about trust. Community health workers are why vaccines reach the people who need them most." 

Evaluating what's already working 

Sajili's research evaluates community health worker interventions to improve vaccine uptake—not inventing new approaches, but documenting the effectiveness of trusted community members doing essential work. His research builds the evidence base that community health workers need to secure sustainable funding and recognition.

The work captures both outcomes (vaccination rates) and mechanisms (how trust, language, cultural understanding, and relationship enable uptake). It's research that validates community health workers as skilled professionals, not volunteers, and makes the case for investing in their training and compensation. 

Building evidence for investment 

By rigorously documenting community health worker impact, Sajili creates ammunition for policy arguments and funding decisions. He's proving that equity doesn't require expensive new technologies—it requires properly supporting the people who've always connected communities to health systems.

Érinn C. Cameron, PhD 

Protecting mothers and babies from extreme heat in São Paulo and Bucaramanga

"Housing is not just shelter; it is a critical part of the maternal health environment. Our research demonstrates that safer homes for pregnant women and infants can be achieved through practical, low-cost interventions."

Turning the home into a health intervention 

Cameron and her partners in Brazil and Colombia are tackling one of the defining health threats of our time: what happens inside the walls of informal housing when temperatures rise. Standard heat research relies on outdoor air measurements and hospital records — missing the reality of how heat is actually experienced in self-built homes with heat-absorbing roofs, poor ventilation, and no reliable electricity. For pregnant women in these communities, that gap can mean preterm birth, hypertensive complications, and deteriorating mental health. 

Her team is piloting reflective roof coatings — "cool roofs" — as a low-cost, scalable household intervention, pairing implementation with indoor temperature monitoring and culturally adapted tools to measure what extreme heat is actually doing to perinatal mental health and birth outcomes. 

Building with communities, not around them 

The São Paulo and Bucaramanga projects embed researchers alongside housing movements, neighborhood associations, and municipal partners — co-designing solutions with residents rather than for them. Success isn't measured by rooftop reflectivity alone, but by whether cooler homes produce healthier pregnancies and better mental health outcomes for women who currently have no refuge from the heat.

Gary W. Harper, PhD, MPH

Working with local leaders of community-based organizations in Kenya to tell their stories through research

"The knowledge was never missing—just undervalued. Our job is to build structures that redistribute who gets to say what counts as evidence."

Systems that center local leadership 

Harper believes that sustainable health equity requires shifting who leads research, not just where it happens. He co-founded the Imarisha Institute to strengthen community research capacity in Kenya, training local leaders of LGBTQ+ community-based organizations to design studies, secure funding, and drive their own evidence agendas. The idea for this project came from community leaders who shared in conversation with Harper: “We are tired of others telling our story…we want to tell our own story.” Imarisha operates as a research partnership where Kenyan scholars lead protocol development, author publications, and make decisions about research and dissemination priorities. The model challenges extraction-based "global health" by redistributing resources, expertise, and power to communities who have been the subject of externally-driven research for too long. 

Building for sustainability 

The Institute trains community-based researchers in social and behavioral science research methods and strategies, in community-engaged methods, grant writing, and ethical frameworks—capabilities that outlast any single project. Harper's team tracks not just research outputs but leadership indicators: who's PI, where funding flows, whose questions get asked. They're proving that capacity building means letting go of control.

Maria Muzik, MD, MS

Working with women, peer support networks, and traditional healers in Esmeraldas, Ecuador  

"You can't separate mental health from social context. Ecorazón recognizes that resilience grows from community, not just individual intervention." 

Intervention as relationship 

Muzik approaches stress reduction as fundamentally relational work. Her Ecorazón project brings women together in Esmeraldas, Ecuador—a region facing economic instability, violence, and climate impacts—to build collective resilience through peer support, traditional practices, connection to place, and love for their children. 

The intervention doesn't pathologize stress or medicalize responses. Instead, it creates space for women to name shared experiences, draw on cultural strengths, and support each other through challenges that can't be solved individually. Mental health becomes something communities cultivate together, not something experts deliver. 

Building with cultural wisdom 

Ecorazón integrates practices women already use—including traditional healing, storytelling, focus on motherhood, and collective care—with evidence-based stress reduction. The model is being adapted across contexts, showing that effective mental health intervention can honor local knowledge rather than replace it.