Clara is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow trained in Epidemiology, working for the HaSET Maternal and Child Health Research Program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She currently focuses on study design, data management and analysis of longitudinal data, and capacity building in the field of maternal and child health. She specifically works with data from an open pregnancy and child cohort and a health and demographic surveillance system in North Shewa Zone, Ethiopia. She is leading studies on risk prediction of adverse birth outcomes, and coverage, effective coverage and risk prediction of antenatal care utilization. Before joining the HaSET team, Clara completed a PhD in maternal health epidemiology in Barcelona, Spain. She has extensive experience in conducting research on maternal and child health in low-resource settings. Clara participated in observational studies in Africa, and in clinical trials in Africa and Europe.
Clara’s project focuses on building local capacity in Ethiopia to improve the quality of data collected at the health facility level to better respond to research questions about maternal and child health. A co-designed training will be delivered to health workers and data collectors working on the Birhan field site, which will be as well an opportunity to learn from the training participants about their challenges when collecting data in their health facilities and communities.