Kristin Banek, PhD, MPH

Dr. Kristin Banek is an Infectious Disease Epidemiologist. Her current research examines antimalarial treatment effectiveness and adherence in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. More broadly, she is interested in optimizing the implementation and effectiveness of malaria interventions and measuring their impact on disease prevalence and transmission. Dr. Banek earned her BA in Biology and German from St. Olaf College and her MPH in International Health and Development from the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. Her passion for global health and malaria began at Tulane while working with backpack medics along the Thai-Burmese border to design, implement, and evaluate a malaria control program for displaced populations inside Myanmar. Her academic journey culminated in a PhD from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where she designed a national malaria survey and conducted a randomized control trial to measure adherence behaviors between antimalarial medications in Sierra Leone. More recently, she spent over five years in Kinshasa, DRC, as a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, collecting data on malaria treatment seeking and adherence behaviors within the context of a longitudinal study.

Dr. Banek has extensive field experience undertaking research in developing countries and post-conflict/fragile state contexts. Her work began as an epidemiologist with the Uganda Malaria Surveillance Project (UMSP), where she was the epidemiologist for a multi-site antimalarial drug efficacy trial to provide data on malaria treatment regimens to the Ugandan Ministry of Health. She then served as the Technical and Country Director for a non-governmental organization focusing on malaria program implementation