Melody is a Wellcome Trust Master’s fellow in Public Health and Tropical Medicine with a focus on health management, planning and policy. She obtained her MA from the University of Leeds and a BA from University of Malawi. She works with Malawi Liverpool Wellcome trust as a research fellow in health systems and policy. Her research interests centre around policy development and health systems.
Her current research project, titled “A Baseline assessment of the Evidence Informed Decision making Network in Health in Malawi (EvIDeNt) using policy analysis and a prospective case study”, aims to understand policy links and support evidence informed health policy by strengthening EvIDeNt as a policy network and providing lessons around factors that facilitate and hinder research use in Malawi.
Previously, she worked with the Malawi Ministry of Health and African Institute for Development Policy (AFIDEP) to strengthen the use of research evidence among policymakers and to understand how they make decisions that affect health programs.
Her career goal is to become an international expert in health systems and policy research, particularly in health policy development and knowledge translation in low and middle-income countries. Her main aspiration is to bridge the gap between knowledge generated through research and utilization by key users for translation into policy.