Roxanna is a doctoral candidate in Social Intervention and a dual Clarendon and ESRC scholar at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. Originally from California in the United States, she completed her undergraduate degree in Neurobiology at Harvard University before heading to Oxford in 2015 for her M.Sc. in Evidence-Based Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation. During her undergraduate career, Roxanna extensively researched HIV/AIDS from a wide range of perspectives, including biomedical and clinical research. In 2014, she interned with the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) site in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, working to transition management of services from the organisation to the Ethiopian government.

Roxanna’s doctoral research focuses on the effects of decentralising care from hospitals to referral clinics and centres for adolescent HIV/AIDS patient health outcomes. With this research, she hopes to provide recommendations for optimising care in the decentralised model. Through this work, she has been working closely with the incredible clinic team of Mzantsi Wakho and will begin her fieldwork in the Eastern Cape in 2017. In the future, Roxanna hopes to combine her background in medicine, public health, and social policy to develop more effective methods of healthcare delivery in resource-limited settings.