Services
Public health challenges are multifactorial, so their solutions benefit from insights drawn from across multiple domains and issue areas. Drawing on my experience across sectors, subjects, and skillsets, I bring novel insights and creative approaches to your challenges that are also grounded in equity and realistic about the constraints of the current public health landscape and your organization’s needs.
I help leaders decide where to focus limited resources for the greatest return: this includes advising on organizational strategy, priorities, and operations; funding and grant development; partnerships; and research and evaluation approaches to support your goals. I have done this from both inside organizations and as an advisor to public health agencies, health care systems, nonprofits, foundations, academic centers, and startups.
Clients often come to me at a point of transition or decision: an organization redefining its strategy, a promising program that needs adjustments and funding to be scaled, a policy goal without a clear route to adoption, or a new initiative that needs a strong evidence base, partners, and a roadmap to success. In each case, I can help you figure out the path forward.
Strategic Advising
Communication and Partnerships
The strongest evidence won't make a difference if you can't persuade people to act on it. I have spent much of my career translating evidence into compelling campaigns and messages, including for the CDC's national HIV prevention campaigns, for train-the-trainer sessions to encourage Covid-19 vaccination and debunk misinformation at the height of the pandemic, and for academic centers and advocacy groups working to improve community health.
Using my expertise in behavioral science and message framing, I can help you identify what will move a specific audience to act – and what might cause them to tune out or even push back. I treat communication as part of the design rather than something tacked on once a program is built, because how an initiative is framed at the outset can determine whether it is ever adopted. I have created narratives that resonate with funders, policymakers, and the public to secure funding, build support for policies, change how an issue is understood, and catalyze action.
Initiatives that have potential for high impact often require convening people who don't necessarily share priorities or goals — whether it’s within an organization or across sectors — and getting them to move in the same direction. I can help your team build and nurture those relationships and develop messages that resonate with each group so that you get closer to your goal.
Working Together
Every engagement is built around what you need. Some clients want a couple of conversations to test an idea before it goes to a board or a short-term fractional leader for their team. Others need a partner for multi-year initiative design and evaluation, ongoing communication counsel, or project-based evidence synthesis and messaging. I shape the scope and cadence of our work together around your capacity, needs, and constraints.
I also speak, teach, and write on food and nutrition policy, public health communication, and the systems that shape people's health and what they eat. I can represent your work in public, whether that’s on a panel or with the media; lead a skills-building session for your team; or deliver a guest lecture.
Design for Impact
I design programs, policies, and digital health products that incorporate evidence and best practices from public health and medicine, behavioral science, communication, and implementation science. My extensive experience building and leading initiatives from concept through implementation and evaluation informs that work. What we create together is optimized for the outcomes you want and built for real-world constraints — small budgets, staff stretched thin, and everyone's very limited time and attention — so that it is sound in theory and realistic in practice.
I design evaluations alongside initiatives so that you can best assess the outcomes and user experiences you need to make the case to funders and investors for scaling and expansion. I also work with clients who need guidance on designing and conducting evaluations of initiatives that have already launched or have been completed.
My work has spanned policies to improve food environments and health care decisions; product design and strategy for digital health tools; and studies and evaluations of programs to improve nutrition, manage chronic disease, and address unmet social needs. I bring the lessons learned from all of it so that your initiative is primed for success.
