My research focuses on the social determinants of infectious diseases, mainly on HIV and mainly in sub-Saharan-Africa. I have also researched the social patterning of tuberculosis and HIV in Brazil, bacterial sexually transmitted infections in the United States and Covid-19 in South Africa. 

My primary analytic lense is social connections as seen in networks. I evaluate how social support and interaction can provide positive health outcomes: both the avoidance of unwanted infections such as HIV, and successful management of health conditions. This work has led me to start researching the health of older adults, particularly around dementia. 

I am always concerned about data quality, which has led me to conduct research on field methods. This includes trials of methods to help respondents report sensitive data (e.g. sexual behaviour, history of abuse), including use of computer-based self-reporting and nonverbal response cards. Interviewer behaviour has a substantial impact on the data collected, and I have worked to understand how this happens and how we can account for it in analysis. 

I have overseen several field studies in South Africa, Tanzania and Burkina Faso, and have also been involved in studies in Uganda and Zambia. For these studies we have used OpenDataKit, CommCare, REDCap and Network Canvas data capture software.  Analytically, I work in Stata, R and Python to appropriately manage dependencies between data, including hierarchical, spatial and network modelling. I used to work on the cost and cost-effectiveness of HIV services.