Herieth Alexander Mboya

Herieth Alexander Mboya is a medical doctor pursuing an MSc in Modelling for Global Health at the University of Oxford. She is a Mastercard Foundation Scholar and a member of Green Templeton College.

Training and working as a medical doctor exposed her to the complex realities that shape health outcomes. She witnessed how diseases affect communities differently and how better evidence could inform more effective interventions at the population level. This curiosity led her from clinical practice into research and health data analytics.

Over the past few years, Herieth has worked across diverse areas of public health, including maternal and child health, nutrition, HIV, rabies, cancer, surgical conditions, and malaria. Her experience has ranged from designing and adopting research tools, to conducting primary data collection, and analysing and interpreting findings. More recently, she has supported malaria programmes across multiple African countries by preparing and validating routine surveillance and survey data for modelling, assessing data quality, and contributing to analyses that inform programme decision-making.

Through this work, Herieth has come to appreciate that producing meaningful evidence requires an understanding of the context in which data are generated, the limitations of health information systems, and the realities faced by the communities represented in those data. These experiences have shaped her research interests in infectious disease modelling, spatial epidemiology, population dynamics, and health systems.

At Oxford, Herieth is pursuing the MSc in Modelling for Global Health to build rigorous quantitative skills that will enable her to develop models that are both methodologically robust and relevant to real-world decision-making. Her long-term goal is to contribute to strengthening disease surveillance and health systems across Africa by developing context-specific modelling approaches that support equitable, evidence-informed public health policy.