Staff biographies

Charlotte Watts PhD

Sigrid Rausing Professor
Director, Gender, Violence & Health Centre

Charlotte Watts is founding director of the Gender Violence and Health Centre at LSHTM. An internationally renowned expert on Violence Against Women, and on Gender and HIV, she has more than fifteen years experience in HIV and violence research.

Originally trained as a mathematician, with further training in epidemiology and public health, Charlotte brings a unique, multi-disciplinary perspective to the complex challenge of addressing women’s vulnerability to violence and to HIV, with a strong commitment to drawing upon the multi-disciplinary expertise of GVHC to conduct rigorous, action-oriented research to inform change.

Charlotte has held several senior research and advisory positions, including acting as a Core Research Team member for the WHO Multi-Country Study on Women’s Health and Domestic Violence (1997-present); Chair of the Expert Working Group to Asess the Global Burden of Inter-personal Violence (2009- 10); Advisor to the UK Prevalence Study Study of the Mistreatment and Abuse of Older People (2005-9); and Chair of the Public Health Benefits Working Group of the Rockefeller Foundation Microbicide Initiative (2000-2002). She has served on several WHO Expert Consultations on HIV, violence against women, and on microbicides, and was Track C co-chair of the Microbicides 2006 conference.

She regularly gives presentations at national and international meetings, and at LSHTM teaches PhD and MSc students.

Cathy Zimmerman PhD

Senior Lecturer, Gender, Violence and Health

Cathy Zimmerman has carried out some of the first-ever research on the health of trafficked women in Europe and developed innovative conceptual models for looking at health risks and interventions associated with trafficking. Most recently, she led a multi-country survey collecting data on the physical, sexual, and mental health consequences of women in post-trafficking service settings. Findings from this study have been presented for the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, the British and Scottish parliaments, numerous international and non-governmental organisations, and law enforcement personnel. Cathy is the co-author of the WHO Ethical and Safety Recommendations on Interviewing Trafficked Women. She has authored several book chapters and articles on health, rights and trafficking in women. From 1993 to 1998, Cathy worked in Cambodia, where she founded and managed the first local non-governmental organisation on domestic violence. She also led a national survey on domestic violence in Cambodia, conducted other related research, and worked with local projects on gender and development, child abuse, and trafficking in women and children.

Lori Heise MSc

Lecturer

Lori Heise is a long-time women’s health advocate who has worked for many years on the issues of gender, sexuality and power. She has been instrumental in getting two critical issues onto the world agenda: violence against women and the need to expand woman’s options for HIV protection. In the early 1990s, she worked with Dr. Charlotte Bunch at the Center for Women’s Global Leadership, to get violence recognized as an human rights issue at the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights and to integrate concern for violence into international health programming. In 1993 she co-founded the Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE), an NGO focused on the effects of U.S. international policies on the health and rights of women and girls in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Her particular expertise is using research to inform advocacy and bridging the cultural divide between researchers and activists. She is a member of the core research team of the WHO Multi-country Study on Women’s Health and Domestic Violence, and is presently conducting Ph.D. research to explore its determinants. She has published widely on the topic of violence against women. In 2001, she received the President’s award for excellence in advocacy from the American Social Health Association and in 2003 she was recognized by Ms. Magazine as one of the “50 women who made a difference”.

Anna Foss PhD

Lecturer in Mathematical Epidemiological Modeling

Anna Foss initially joined LSHTM in July 2001 after graduating with a Masters of Mathematics from the University of Manchester. Anna is a member of the HIV Tools Research Group and the Gender Violence & Health Centre. She has been working primarily on mathematically modelling the transmission of HIV and STIs, and the potential impact of current and future HIV/STI prevention interventions, among female sex workers, injecting drug users and men who have sex with men, in different settings. Alongside this work, Anna completed a part-time staff-PhD, titled: ‘Mathematical modelling of HIV/STI transmission and prevention: methodological issues when dealing with uncertainty’.

In collaboration with staff in GVHC, Anna is currently working to link epidemiological modelling to social science research in order to explore questions around the concept of a ‘core group’ in HIV transmission dynamics, and the increase in an individual’s risk of acquiring HIV through rape. This work is unique, in that it aims to use mathematical epidemiological approaches to quantify the HIV risks that may be associated with sexual violence on HIV transmission.

Loraine Bacchus PhD

Lecturer in Social Science

Loraine Bacchus is a mixed methods social scientist with a background in UK health service research. She completed her PhD in Psychiatry in 2002 for the first UK study to explore routine screening for domestic violence by midwives, as part of the Economic and Social Research Council’s UK Violence Research Programme. Following this, she worked on the first UK survey of the prevalence of domestic violence in pregnancy and associated maternal and fetal health outcomes. In 2003 she joined Kings College London where she was the Principal Investigator on a theory based evaluation of a multi-agency domestic violence intervention based in maternity and sexual health settings. In her non-academic role, Loraine has worked as a domestic violence advocate in primary care and developed clinical guidelines for addressing domestic violence in a range of healthcare settings. She was the Co-ordinator of the UK national forum Health Ending Violence and Abuse Now (HEVAN), has served on the Board of the Nursing Network on Violence Against Women International (NNVAWI) and acts as an external consultant to other organisations developing health sector responses to domestic violence. In 2008 she joined GVHC as a Research Fellow. She is part of the team working on the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) project. She is also a involved in the first UK programme grant, funded by the NIHR, to improve the response of the health service to domestic violence through effective care for survivors and perpetrators. She is the Principal Investigator on a new study to inform domestc violence inerventions for men who have sex with men (MSM) attending sexual health clinics (see www.provide.ac.uk for more information). She is also the Principal Investigator on a Daphne funded study exploring promising health sector interventions to address domestic violence in Europe.

Karen Devries PhD

Lecturer in Social Epidemiology

Karen is a social epidemiologist at the Gender, Violence and Health Centre.  She first joined the LSHTM in 2003 to do a PhD, and has recently completed a post-doctoral fellowship with Professor Charlotte Watts.  Her  main interests relate to gender, sexual violence and coercion, and prevention strategies for sexual violence and its sequelae.

Karen  supervises MSc students, gives a lecture on how disease burden is measured, and teaches on several distance learning courses for the Distance Learning MSc Epidemiology (Reading and Writing Papers, and Genetic Epidemiology).

Karen is currently involved in two main projects.  First, she coordinates the GVH Centre’s involvement in the current round of Global Burden of Disease Study. The group is producing estimates of the prevalence of and disease burden associated with intimate partner violence, childhood sexual abuse, and non-partner sexual violence, for every region of the world.  She is also taking on coordination of SASA!, a cluster-randomised trial of a violence and HIV prevention intervention in Kampala, Uganda.  She will be based in Kampala from September 2010.

Karen’s previous research has been focused mainly on the sexual health of urban and rural Canadian indigenous adolescents, including determinants of suicidal behaviour, and links between sexual behaviour and experiences of sexual violence.  Prior to joining the school, she  was at the BC Centre of Excellence for Women’s Health in Vancouver, Canada, doing research on tobacco use among pregnant women, low-income women and Aboriginal peoples.

Ligia Kiss PhD

Research Fellow

Ligia initially started working with gender-based violence after graduating in Anthropology from the University of Lille III, France while finishing her Social Sciences degree at the University of Sao Paulo, where she also completed an MSc and a PhD in Preventive Medicine. As part of the Gender, Violence and Health Centre in the Preventive Medicine Department at the Medical School of the University of Sao Paulo, she has worked for seven years in a range of quantitative and qualitative research, intervention projects and teaching activities on gender, violence and health in different regions of Brazil.

She joined the Gender, Violence and Health Centre at the LSHTM in 2007 and is part of the team conducting data analysis for the World Health Organization (WHO) multi-country study on women’s health and domestic violence. She is currently working on a cluster-randomized trial for an intervention to prevent violence against women and HIV infection in Kampala, Uganda; on other evaluation studies in Zimbabwe and Cote d’Ivoire; and on research and policy recommendations on asylum seekers’ health priorities. She is also co-investigator of a project for multilevel analysis of microdata on women’s responses to intimate partner violence in Brazil. Her main fields of work are intervention studies on gender and violence; socioeconomic inequalities and intimate partner violence; and migration and health.

Heidi Stöckl PhD

Research Fellow

Heidi Stöckl has a background in political science, sociology and evidence-based social intervention. As an MRC/ESRC Interdisciplinary Research Fellow she is investigating different intervention models to prevent and address partner violence in antenatal care in Tanzania as well as carrying out a risk and protective factor analysis for partner violence in current relationships in Germany.

She completed her PhD in Evidence-based Social Intervention at the University of Oxford, Nuffield College in 2009, funded by a Rhodes Scholarship. Her thesis on partner violence during pregnancy and its risk and protective factors in Germany comprises the first prevalence survey on partner violence during pregnancy, in addition to a secondary analysis of a national representative survey on violence against women in Germany and qualitative interviews. Her previous research has been focused on human trafficking in Uzbekistan and women migrants worker’s in Asia.

She currently serves on the Board of the Nursing Network on Violence Against Women International (NNVAWI) and is a long standing member of the violence against women coordination group of Amnesty International in Germany.

Mazeda Hossain MSc

Research Fellow

Mazeda Hossain is a social epidemiologist conducting research on gender, violence and its health consequences. She is currently leading a randomised community trial in Cote d’Ivoire to evaluate the impact of combining a male-focused intervention with existing gender violence programming in order to reduce vulnerability to intimate partner violence. Prior to this, she coordinated a multi-country study on health and violence against women asylum seekers and refugees in Europe. She was also extensively involved in another multi-country study measuring the physical and mental health outcomes of women trafficked for sexual exploitation in Europe. Since joining the Gender Violence & Health Centre, she has been involved with the development of study protocols and questionnaires measuring violence among vulnerable populations; coordinated a household survey in Cote d’Ivoire among men and women; trained study teams in data collection methods that are sensitive to the needs of traumatised populations; and developed sexual and reproductive health guidelines for trafficked women and people living with HIV/AIDS. Her current research interests are focused on violence in conflict-affected settings and its relationship to partner violence.

Tanya Abramsky MSc

Research Fellow

Tanya is an experienced epidemiologist, who first came to LSHTM to do the MSc Epidemiology in 2002-3, after gaining her first degree in Human Sciences from Oxford. She rejoined the School in September 2004 as a Research Fellow on the Young Lives Project, a longitudinal survey of childhood poverty in four developing countries.

In GVHC she is currently working on two intervention studies to assess the impact of different approaches to preventing intimate partner violence: analysing data from the IMAGE study, a randomised control trial to evaluate the effect of a microfinance-based poverty alleviation and empowerment strategy on levels of domestic violence and HIV; and assessing with the design, analysis and monitoring of the SASA! Study, another community randomised trial evaluating the effect of a community mobilisation intervention on HIV and violence against women in Kampala, Uganda.

She is also analysing data from the WHO Multi-country Study on Women’s Health and Domestic Violence to explore the consequences of IPV for health, identify risk-factors and protective factors for IPV across settings, and document strategies and services that women use to cope with IPV. Tanya teaches on the Basic Epidemiology linear unit in the first term, and is also a personal tutor on the MSc Epidemiology course.

Julia Kim MD MSc

Honorary Research Fellow

Julia Kim has a background in Internal Medicine from Tufts University School of Medicine, where she completed a Fellowship in International Health and Women’s Health before turning to public health research focusing on gender-based violence and HIV/AIDS. For the past ten years, she has been based in rural South Africa, where she held dual appointments at the School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand, and the Gender Violence and Health Centre at LSHTM.

Prior work has included developing approaches to training primary health care nurses on domestic violence, and incorporating domestic violence concerns into provision of HIV counseling and testing services. She has also worked with the Department of Education and the University of the Western Cape to develop training approaches for primary school teachers and learners to address gender based violence. More recent work with the Population Council has developed and evaluated a nurse-driven model for management of sexual violence, including HIV post-exposure prophylaxis. She is also a core investigator in the IMAGE Study (Intervention with Microfinance for AIDS and Gender Equity). Recent interests have focused on exploring the interface between popular culture and public health, with a particular interest in music and the arts as a medium for social change.

Julia recently moved to UNDP, but will maintain an honorary position with GVHC at LSHTM

Manuela Colombini PhD

Research Fellow, Centre for Population Studies and GVHC

Manuela Colombini, originally a political scientist, has been working on sexual and reproductive health over the past nine years. Her interest in violence and health related issues began during her MSc in Gender and Development at the London School of Economics. During her subsequent work at the Department of Reproductive Health and Research of the World Health Organization, in Geneva, she focused on capacity building and sexual violence in conflict settings. She traveled to several countries in central and south east Asia, in sub-Saharan and western Africa, to provide technical assistance to training centres and institutions and help them adapt and run gender and rights courses in reproductive health. She also worked on sexual violence issues and, particularly, on the 2005 revision of the Clinical Management of Rape Survivors, a guide for use in emergency settings.

She recently completed her PhD research at LSHTM on barriers and opportunities to implement and integrate health service responses to intimate partner violence within existing services at secondary/tertiary care levels in Malaysia, and is supporting research to inform the development of health sector responses to domestic and sexual violence against women in low and middle income countries.

Leslie Kelly

PhD student

Prior to joining LSHTM as a PhD student, Leslie Kelly has worked variously as a Physiotherapist, Military Officer (logistician and infantry commander) in the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF). He holds a diploma in Physiotherapy, a diploma in Public Administration (Hons), and Master of Public Health Degree from the University of the West Indies, Mona Jamaica. Leslie is now enrolled as a Ph.D. research student in the Faculty of Public Health and Policy at LSHTM, and is an honorary research fellow in the Gender Violence and Health Centre. His current research focuses on social stress research in low income Jamaican areas, social capital, exposure to crime and violence, fear of crime, perceived neighbourhood disorder and mental-ill heath. He is also part time Distance Learning Tutor with the University of London (LSHTM, MSc in Public Health).

Joelle Mak MSc

Research Fellow

Joelle joined the Gender Violence & Health Centre after completing her MSc in Reproductive & Sexual Health Research at LSHTM. Prior to joining the School, she has worked in community-based organisations in Belize, Sierra Leone and Namibia on HIV and sexual health projects targetting young people.

She is currently involved in a study exploring the potential outcomes of a grants scheme for young women in Zimbabwe and Tanzania as well as the Global Burden of Disease project.

Rosa Arques

Group Administrator

Michelle Remme MSc

Research Fellow in Health Economics

Michelle Remme is an economist with seven years of experience in the health sector and the broader HIV sector, both at the international and country level. After completing her MSc in International Economics and Finance at Tilburg University, The Netherlands (2005), she worked as a policy officer at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the socio-economic dimensions of HIV/AIDS and broader health financing issues. She then spent 3 years in Malawi with the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, providing technical assistance on the integration of HIV, gender and food security.