Profile

I live in Oxford and am a member of the Oxford University African Choir – and have learnt to sing in Swahili, Sotho, Zulu and Ghanaian!  I love travelling and love being out in nature. I have lived and worked in rural India – spending 6 months in a jungle with wild elephants, and 6 months in the Himalayas on the banks of the Ganges river.  I have also worked in Malawi and Kenya, Africa, and got to see magnificent wildlife up close!  I have been a vegetarian all my life. I love Indian and Italian food.

Our African Choir!

I am a doctor, now doing my PhD in Oxford. My research involves using affordable mobile technologies to train and support female health care workers in rural India, where there are no or very few doctors. I work with pregnant women and their newborn babies and support village health care workers to look after these women and their babies in their villages, together with their nearest doctor.

My work investigates the ways in which technology can be used to strengthen the delivery of healthcare in rural settings. I also investigate the links between pregnant women who have high blood pressure, high blood sugar, and anaemia (thin blood), and their long-term risks of getting heart disease, diabetes and stroke.

In India, I travel into the field (rural areas) and meet with healthcare workers.  We try out new versions of the technology I am developing and I get their feedback on using this.  We also discuss the challenges and improvements that could be made in terms of the local health system.  I return late, pretty exhausted, read through my work, make my field notes and sleep.

In the UK, I work with an international team across Australia and India and UK.  We can only have calls early morning to meet all three time zones.  We discuss the technology that we are developing, and I provide the doctor-input for the coders and android developers to work with.  We are a team.  I meet and teach medical students in global surgery.  I attend talks and training held at the university and I write up my fieldwork and read a lot +++. I design and write-up the research protocols and studies that we are doing, and design training materials for the local doctors and village healthcare workers.  I communicate almost daily with the team in India, both in the office and in the field, to ensure everything is running well on the ground.