Dr. Baumgartner is a public health practitioner and researcher with 20 years of experience working in low- and middle-income countries to strengthen the delivery of HIV, reproductive health, maternal and child health (MCH), and mental health services. She is Director of the DGHI Evidence Lab whose mission is to conduct rigorous evaluation research in low-resource settings together with local partners to inform evidence-based programs and interventions. Baumgartner has experience with a range of evaluation designs and methods from formative research to design a program to randomized trials to test program effectiveness. Her particular areas of research expertise include global maternal and child health (MCH), mental health, and evaluating the health impact of social enterprises.
As a Scientist at FHI 360 for 10 years prior to joining DGHI, Dr. Baumgartner previous projects included working with Ministries of Health across sub-Saharan Africa to develop and test reproductive health and HIV-related health service interventions with a focus on services integration and meeting the health needs of adolescents. Since joining DGHI in 2014, current research projects include developing and testing a psychosocial intervention for adults with psychotic disorders in Tanzania, developing and testing a model of integrated adolescent healthcare linked to schools in Tanzania, integrating HIV and mental health care in Zambia, evaluating the impact of MCH programs in East and West Africa, and in East Africa and India, supporting private sector healthcare entrepreneurs to collect stronger M&E data in order to highlight the impact of their innovations. She currently leads or has led projects in Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Cameroon, Ghana, Zambia, South Africa, India, and Jamaica.
Dr. Baumgartner has a master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a PhD in Maternal and Child Health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and she completed a an NIMH T32 postdoctoral fellowship in Psychiatric Epidemiology at Columbia University focused on global mental health.
