Dr Susan Kelly
Research Fellow in Social Science
United Kingdom
I am an applied social scientist specialising in global health and childhoods. I have more than 20-years’ experience in global public health and have lived and worked in East Africa (Uganda and Tanzania) since 2003. My work spans the fields of HIV care, treatment and research, human papillomavirus (HPV), vaccine hesitance and violence affecting children. Through my on-the-ground experiences in both Uganda and Tanzania, I have developed a keen interest in the space between people's daily realities and global discourses and agendas.
Affiliations
Department of Global Health and Development
Faculty of Public Health and Policy
Teaching
I currently am an LSHTM Distance Learning (DL) tutor and MSc project and PhD/DrPH supervisor. I tutor on the DL module Health Policy, Process and Power (HPPP), and have supported the contextualisation and trained extensively in East Africa on the Baylor College of Medicine International Pediatric AIDS Initiative (BIPAI) curriculum "HIV Curriculum for the Health Professional." Currently, I also support the training of research scholars at Bugando Medical Centre (BMC) and the Catholic University of Health and Allied Sciences (CUHAS) in Mwanza, Tanzania.
Research
I am part of the Politics and Anthropology of Violence and Epidemics (PAVE) group and am currently the lead field social scientist for the Add-Vacc Study in northwest Tanzania. Add-Vacc is a cluster-randomised trial (CRT) evaluating the impact of one-time, single-dose HPV vaccination of boys alongside the national HPV girls’ vaccination program on HPV population prevalence. As part of the social sciences in the Add-Vacc trial, we developed an e-rumours tracking tool that supports community engagement messaging and are conducting rapid ethnography and qualitative interviews to explore the acceptability and delivery of male HPV vaccination in this northwest Tanzania setting.
Research Area
Vaccine confidence
Violence against women and girls
Global health
Child health
Child protection
Social and structural determinants of health
Evaluation
Qualitative research
Ethnography
Social science (general)
Behaviour change
Environmental health
Disease and Health Conditions
HIV/AIDS
Human papillomavirus (HPV)
Country
Uganda
Tanzania
United States of America
Region
North America
Sub-Saharan Africa (all income levels)
Selected Publications
2024
PloS one
"South to South" research capacity building collaboration
2024
How do children define violence and maltreatment in childhood? A systematic review and meta-synthesis of qualitative studies from sub-Saharan Africa
2024
: Children’s agency and reflections on life skills training in a Whole Schools Approach intervention addressing violence in and around schools in Kenya and Tanzania
2023
Reducing community prevalence of HPV by offering a single dose of HPV vaccine to boys and young men in Tanzania: the Add-Vacc cluster-randomised trial
2023
International Papillomavirus Conference
2022
Child abuse & neglect
2022
BMJ Open
Tanzanian childhoods in transition: the role of language and meaning in the transforming children’s rights and protection spaces in Tanzania
2021
2020
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
2019
BMC Public Health
