Tara completed a PhD at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine with a focus on looking at the implementation of the community aspect of a complex quality improvement intervention in southern Tanzania, aimed at improving quality of care for mothers and newborns. She has worked in Nepal, Uganda, Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia, always assessing the implementation of various interventions, typically linked to the health of mothers, newborns, and children.
Tara’s research interests include implementation research (that is, asking the most useful research questions that help to move science into practice), including process evaluation, theory of change-based evaluation, and realist evaluation. She is also interested in health systems strengthening and applying “systems thinking” to research to explore the impact of interventions on a system as a whole. Tara typically applies these approaches to quality improvement interventions with the aim of improving quality of care and/or health outcomes for mothers and newborns.
Tara currently teaches on the following Master’s modules: TROP 923 (Key Concepts in Sexual and Reproductive Health), TROP 926 (Sexual Health and Human Sexuality), TROP 972 (Quality Improvements in Maternal and Newborn Health) and TROP 900 (Health in Humanitarian Emergencies).
She also teaches for the Diploma in Sexual and Reproductive Health in Low-Resource Areas and the Diploma in Tropical Nursing.
Tara is a member of the LSTM Research Ethics Committee.
She is also the European Regional Champion for Health System Global’s thematic working group in teaching and learning for health policy and systems research.