Sue Napierala (Mavedzenge), PhD, is a Senior Research Epidemiologist in the Women’s Global Health Imperative (WGHI) within RTI’s Social and Statistical Sciences Group. WGHI is dedicated to improving the health status of women and girls around the world. Based in RTI’s San Francisco office, WGHI is conducting groundbreaking research on HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted infections (STIs), reproductive health, gender and economic inequities, contraceptive technologies, female-initiated methods of HIV prevention, and community-based interventions among vulnerable populations in low-resource settings.

Dr. Napierala is an infectious disease epidemiologist with a focus on HIV and other STIs, sexual and reproductive health, and health disparities. Her work focusses on implementation science, using scientific methods to integrate research findings and evidence-based interventions into policy and practice. To that end, she is involved in research on innovative strategies to scale up HIV testing and engagement across the HIV prevention and care continuum. She is particularly focused on tailoring services to improve the engagement of key and other hard-to-reach populations. Other research interests include the epidemiological synergy of HIV and STI co-infection, HIV prevention among young people, female-controlled methods of HIV prevention, and health economics of HIV service delivery.  Dr. Napierala has extensive experience in protocol development, grant writing, and the implementation and management of trials for HIV prevention. She is also an experienced clinical trials monitor, including the monitoring of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulated trials. She has many years of field research experience working on intervention studies for the prevention of HIV and other STIs. In addition to her research endeavors, Dr. Napierala has a number of years of experience teaching graduate-level courses in clinical trials and in epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.