Joy Noel Baumgartner

Biography

Joy Noel is a public health researcher with 20 years of experience working in low-resource settings 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- and middle-income countries with local partners to inform evidence-based programs and interventions. Joy Noel has experience with a range of evaluation designs and methods from formative research to randomized trials to test an intervention's effectiveness. Her previous projects have included working with Ministries of Health across sub-Saharan Africa to develop and test reproductive health and HIV-related health services interventions with a focus on services integration and meeting the health needs of adolescents. As a Scientist at FHI 360 for 10 years prior to joining DGHI, Joy Noel led research projects in Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa, Kenya, India, and Jamaica. Current research projects at DGHI include integrating HIV and mental health care in Zambia, developing and testing a model of integrated adolescent healthcare linked to schools in Tanzania, 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. 

Research Interest

Joy Noel 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 postdoctoral fellowship in Psychiatric Epidemiology at Columbia University focused on global mental health.