When I was seven, we travelled to Guyana to stay with my dad for a few months. Having grown up in London, it was a bit of a culture shock in many ways. During that visit, my cousin was in an accident, and I remember visiting her in a hospital that was under-resourced and overwhelmed. Family members had to step in to clean wounds and provide care. That moment stayed with me – it made me realise how deeply context shapes people. The systems you’re born into, the culture and norms that surround you, can change everything: your health, your opportunities, even your sense of self. I became fascinated by how context shapes behaviour, particularly at the intersection of health and society.

That curiosity eventually brought me to Busara in 2017, where I began by leading some of our earliest projects in sexual and reproductive health. I worked on a range of studies; from increasing uptake of oral PrEP among vulnerable populations in Kenya, to designing a youth-friendly app for adolescent girls in Tanzania, to supporting the rollout of the PrEP ring across multiple countries, to designing communication materials for palliative care in Kenya, and designing interventions to promote uptake of self-injectable contraceptives.

Through these projects, it became clear that while our quantitative methods were strong, they didn’t always bring us close enough to the lived experiences of the people we were designing for. We needed to listen more deeply, involve communities more intentionally, and build solutions with them. This led me to set up Busara’s qualitative and design team, which has since expanded and merged with other method specialist teams into the broader Methods and Practice function I now lead.

I currently oversee three teams:

• BRACE (Behavioral Research and Academic Engagements) collaborates with local and global academics to conduct rigorous, contextualized behavioral research,  including lab experiments, field trials and experiments.  BRACE also manages Busara’s behavioral lab; among the first and largest in the Global South, which allows us to explore behavioral mechanisms in controlled environments before moving to fieldwork and scale
• The Research Improvement team focuses on strengthening how research is done. Using meta-research, the team explores and addresses gaps in research practice: improving our methodological rigour, ensuring ethical standards, and embedding participatory and decolonial approaches to knowledge generation, including pioneering the use of citizen ethnography as a new method at Busara.
• The Technical Vertical (TV) is Busara’s internal hub of methodological expertise across qualitative research, quantitative research, behavioural design, and visual design. We support teams across the organisation by providing specialist input, building internal capacity, and setting quality standards.The TV plays a vital role in ensuring that Busara’s work is consistently rigorous, intentional, and grounded.

Together, these teams keep Busara at the cutting edge of research and design methods. Whether we’re running lab experiments, co-designing with communities, or rethinking our own research norms, we’re always reflecting on what it means to produce knowledge that is not only rigorous, but relevant, respectful, and rooted in context.

Before joining Busara, I worked in the mental health sector; collaborating with psychologists in schools, supporting women in a medium secure psychiatric unit, and working with individuals experiencing suicidal ideation. I also spent time in the private sector at a sales organisation, where I monitored and coached agents to improve performance and enhance customer experience for several FTSE 250 companies. These experiences gave me a deep appreciation for how systems, structures, and relationships shape human behaviour in different contexts; a perspective that continues to influence my work today. I hold an MSc in Psychology from the University of Westminster and a BSc in Sociology from the London School of Economics.

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