Lydia is a computational social scientist, international relations expert, technical writer, and project manager. She brings 8+ years of experience managing projects throughout the Americas, North Africa, and Southwest Asia, working with global communities to understand and meet needs through research, partnership, and implementation. She specializes in the contexts of forced migration, public health emergencies, and humanitarian crises.
Her expertise in participatory modeling and human centered design has fostered innovation and collaboration through shared visioning, leading to tangible outcomes. She has been a key collaborating partner and lead team member on work awarded through the US Department of Defense Minerva Research Initiative, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Hampton Roads Biomedical Research Consortium. She has led focus groups, workshops, and interviews, both virtually and in-person, in various languages, and with interpreters when appropriate. She has supported the effective communication of key findings via in-depth reports, publications, and short presentations. Her work has been published in journals, blogs, and newspapers, such as Frontiers in Public Health, The Washington Post, and The Conversation.
As a senior associate with Global Health Visions, Lydia has played a pivotal role in partnering with institutions such as the World Health Organization, the Global Taskforce on Cholera Control, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the United Nations Foundation, and UNICEF. Recent work includes interviewing key partners in Southeast Asia and writing a human-centered report on COVID-19 response in the region, performing landscape analyses on global policy and agenda building, and providing research support for global communications.
Lydia is completing her Ph.D. in International Studies, holds a Master of Public Health, a graduate certificate in Modeling and Simulation, and a Bachelor of Science in Biology. Lydia speaks English, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese.