A Senior Lecturer who has been coordinating the Social and Behaviour Change Communication (SBCC) division in the University of the Witwatersrand’s School of Public Health since early 2011. Sara holds a PhD in Public Health (Wits), MPH in Behavioural Sciences (Emory University) and a BA in International Comparative Studies (Duke University). She received her PhD in July 2019 for a mixed-methods study on infant feeding determinants in Soweto, which resulted in four publications. Sara also consults with government agencies, universities and civil society organizations to build SBCC capacity in low and middle-income countries, about which she has also published. Sara is a mixed-methods researcher, with an interest in the measurement of multi-level responses to public health challenges, particularly social (and industry) determinants of health. She co-authored a chapter on the social determinants of health for the South African Health Review 2012 and contributed to South Africa’s current Health Promotion Policy. Her key research interest is infant feeding, where she hopes to continue engaging intensively with civil society and government to improve the health outcomes of both infants and parents. Sara also intends to contribute to the field of SBCC through evaluation of interventions in voluntary medical male circumcision, mHealth and music as approaches to behaviour change and behavioural theory. Sara is also passionate about higher education in Africa, having supervised 17 postgraduate students to graduation thus far. She is active in dialogues about transformation of education and strengthening the capacity of African scholars to determine (and fund) their own research agendas.
