TEAM PROFILE
Clare Barrington
Associate Professor, University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health
Clare Barrington
Clare Barrington an Associate Professor of Health Behavior at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina (UNC), Director of the Doctoral Program in the Department of Health Behavior and co-Investigator of the Cash Transfers and IPV Research Collaborative. She is also the Latin American Projects Director the UNC Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases and a fellow at the Carolina Population Center. Clare is a social scientist with expertise in qualitative and mixed-method research in diverse settings, including Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Her research examines social and structural influences on health and health behaviors, in particular around HIV prevention and care among female sex workers and their partners, men who have sex with men and transgender women. Clare is the PI of qualitative components of cash transfer evaluations within the Transfer Project, including those examining impacts of Government-run unconditional cash transfers in Ghana and Malawi. Dr. Barrington has a Ph.D. and MPH in International Health from Johns Hopkins University, and a BA from Brown University in Community Health and International Development Studies.
Lucy Billings
Project Manager, International Food Policy Research Institute
Lucy Billings
Lucy Billings is a project manager in IFPRI’s Poverty, Health and Nutrition Division where she provides management and research support to projects and programs on social protection, nutrition, gender and agriculture, including the Cash Transfer and IPV Research Collaborative. Lucy started work with IFPRI in 2011 as a Mickey Leland International Hunger Fellow and continued as staff at the conclusion of the Fellowship program in 2013. She has worked in IFPRI’s Uganda and Ghana offices as the headquarters office. She completed a MS/MPH from Tufts University in Food and Agriculture Policy and Public Health in 2011.
Ana Maria Buller
Associate Professor, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Ana Maria Buller
Ana Maria Buller is an Associate Professor in social sciences and Deputy Director of the Gender Violence and Health Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and co-Investigator of the Cash Transfers and IPV Research Collaborative. Dr. Buller has extensive experience in conducting mixed methods social science research, impact evaluations and systematic reviews on social protection and gender-based violence, masculinities, social norms, sexual exploitation of children and adolescents, and associations between health, labor migration and trafficking. She has conducted research in various countries in South America and sub-Saharan Africa. She currently heads the Learning Initiative on Norms, Exploitation and Abuse (LINEA), with projects in Uganda, Tanzania and Brazil including the development of social norms interventions to prevent sexual exploitation of adolescents. Ana Maria holds a Ph.D. in gender and violence from LSHTM, a MSc in Social Research Methods from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and BSc in Social Psychology from the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru.
Lori Heise
Technical Director, Prevention Collaborative
Lori Heise
Lori Heise is the Technical Director of the Prevention Collaborative, a new global initiative designed to support evidence based GBV prevention programming in the Global South, Senior Associate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH) and co-Investigator of the Cash Transfers and IPV Research Collaborative. She has over 25 years of experience working in the areas of gender equity, social change and women’s economic and social empowerment. She is an internationally recognized expert on the causes and consequences of violence against women and is Co-investigator on “What Works to Prevent Violence,” a six year, multi-million-dollar project to reduce gender-based violence (GBV) in low and middle-income countries. Her current research focuses on preventing violence against women and children in the family, transforming gender norms. She was previously a Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine where she served as Research Director of STRIVE, a six country research collaboration dedicated to studying the structural drivers of HIV, including gender inequalities, stigma and criminalization, lack of livelihood options and alcohol use and harmful drinking norms.
Melissa Hidrobo
Senior Research Fellow, International Food Policy Research Institute
Melissa Hidrobo
Melissa Hidrobo is a Senior Research Fellow in the Poverty, Health, and Nutrition Division at IFPRI and co-Investigator of the Cash Transfers and IPV Research Collaborative. She is an applied microeconomist working at the intersection of gender, agriculture, and social protection. Her gender research focuses on how anti-poverty programs affect intrahousehold dynamics, and how intrahousehold dynamics affect agriculture production and production inefficiencies. She has investigated the impacts of cash transfers programs and food assistance programs through her work with the Bono de Desarrollo Humano Program and the World Food Program in Ecuador, the Jigisemejiri program in Mali, and the World Food Program in Bangladesh. Her work in Ecuador, Bangladesh, and Mali focused on the impacts of cash and in-kind transfer on food security and intimate partner violence (IPV), and has led to publications in top journals and commented on in popular media outlets such as the Economist, Quartz, and the Huffington Post. Her work on IPV has been interdisciplinary, working with experts in public health to better understand the pathways and mechanisms through which programs and interventions influence IPV. Dr. Hidrobo holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
Tia Palermo
Associate Professor, University of Buffalo
Tia Palermo
Tia Palermo is an Associate Professor in the Division of Health Services and Practice in the Department of Epidemiology and Environmental Health in the School of Public Health and Health Professions at UB and co-Investigator of the Cash Transfers and IPV Research Collaborative. Her research examines the impacts of social policy on population health, and has led or contributed to evaluations of social protection in Ghana, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. As part of the Transfer Project, her work examines the ability of social policy to improve outcomes among children and adolescents, including those related to schooling, sexual behavior, mental health, and violence. Prior to joining UB, Dr. Palermo was a social policy manager at the UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family, Population and Medicine at Stony Brook University (SUNY) in New York. Tia completed her postdoctoral training at the City University of New York (CUNY) Institute for Demographic Research, holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy from the University of North Carolina (UNC), a MS in Economics from UNC and a BA in Economics and Spanish from the State University of New York at Geneseo.
Amber Peterman
Research Associate Professor, University of North Carolina
Amber Peterman
Amber Peterman is an Research Associate Professor in the Department of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Principal Investigator of the Cash Transfer and IPV Research Collaborative. Her work focuses on the intersection of gender and development, with an emphasis on social protection, gender-based violence and adolescent health and wellbeing. Dr. Peterman is affiliated with the Transfer Project hosted at the Carolina Population Center and is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Global Development. She previously worked as a Social Policy Specialist at UNICEF Office of Research—Innocenti and as a Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington DC., Kampala, and Dakar. She has published widely across development economics and global health, with over 70 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters. Dr. Peterman obtained her Ph.D. in Public Policy with focus on international maternal and child health from UNC Chapel Hill and BA. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego.
Meghna Ranganathan
Associate Professor, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Meghna Ranganathan
Meghna Ranganathan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Health and Development at LSHTM and co-Investigator of the Cash Transfers and IPV Research Collaborative. With a background in social epidemiology and health economics, she employs a mixed-methods approach to her research. She has a particular interest in demand-side interventions that tackle the structural drivers of HIV/AIDS and IPV, with a focus on gender and adolescents. She recently led efforts to evaluate the scale-up of an economic intervention to examine the relationship between women’s empowerment and IPV among a cohort of women in rural South Africa. Other current work also includes the investigation of pathways between transactional sex and HIV risk, and conceptualizing and measuring sexual harassment in low income countries. Dr. Ranganathan has a PhD in Public Health and Policy from LSHTM, an MSc in Health Policy, Planning and Financing from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a BSc in Life Sciences (Biotechnology) from the University of Mumbai, India.
Shalini Roy
Senior Research Fellow, International Food Policy Research Institute
Shalini Roy
Shalini Roy is a Senior Research Fellow in the Poverty, Health, and Nutrition Division at IFPRI and Principal Investigator of the Cash Transfer and IPV Research Collaborative. Dr. Roy is an economist and leader of the “Social protection delivery and outcomes” research cluster under the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. She brings substantial expertise conducting impact evaluations focused on gender and social protection in South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America – including experience co-leading studies of large-scale programs in collaboration with national governments – and has specifically evaluated the effects of transfer programs on intrahousehold dynamics in Bangladesh, Brazil, Uganda, and Mali. Dr. Roy has published widely in top peer-reviewed applied and development economics journals including the Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Development Economics, and Economic Development and Cultural Change. Dr. Roy received a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor’s degree in Economics and Mathematics from Northwestern University.
