/ Research Ethos
The communities I work with are not my subjects. They are my collaborators.
My research begins with a question I return to constantly: why are some communities left out of the preventive health interventions designed to protect them, and what does it actually take to change that?
I work in implementation science and evaluation because I believe the gap between what we know works and what actually reaches people is not a knowledge problem. It is a design problem, a trust problem, and often a power problem.
My research questions do not only originate from the literature. They originate in communities. My PhD dissertation on HPV vaccination and cervical cancer screening among Muslim women in Greater Boston began because the community identified it as a need, and every methodological decision since has been accountable to that origin. Community voice shapes not just what I study but how I study it.
Community-centered from the start
True mixed and multi-methods research
I am a mixed-methods researcher in the fullest sense. I am not someone who adds a survey to a qualitative study or a focus group to a dataset, but someone who believes that quantitative and qualitative work are both necessary to understand the same problem. Quantitative methods help me conceptualize and measure need, see the shape of a disparity, and understand its scope. Qualitative methods help me understand that same need from the inside: the lived experience, the context, the reasons behind the numbers. Neither is subordinate to the other. They work together, asking different questions about the same reality, and it is in that intersection where my research lives.
My work spans the US and Scandinavia, examining how health systems, social structures, and cultural contexts shape health behavior and access differently depending on where someone is from and where they live. The comparison is not incidental. It is the method. Placing systems side by side reveals assumptions that would otherwise stay invisible.