Biography
Alison Krentel completed her postgraduate studies at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine receiving her PhD in Public Health (2008) and her MSc in Public Health in Developing Countries (1999). She is an Associate Professor in the School of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Ottawa, a senior scientist at Bruyère Research Institute, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the WHO Collaborating Centre for Knowledge Translation, Technology Assessment for Health Equity. Alison is one of the founding members and current chair of the Canadian Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases (CNNTD).
Alison’s main area of research interest lies in understanding the equity and effectiveness of public health programmes used in the control and elimination of infectious diseases with a focus on neglected tropical diseases. She is interested in identifying ways to improve community ownership in public health programmes, understanding patterns of non-participation and crafting mixed methods research and interventions to improve uptake of new and existing interventions. Alison worked with the DOLF research group at Washington University in St. Louis as part of a multinational team to assess the safety, efficacy and acceptability of a new treatment regimen for lymphatic filariasis in five countries, leading the acceptability study across the five sites. She continues to research the acceptability of this new treatment regimen in sites in Guyana, Indonesia, Kenya and Papua New Guinea. Her current research portfolio includes implementation research to improve coverage of mass drug administration for onchocerciasis in hard-to-reach populations in Mali. She is one of the lead PIs for a study understanding the transition to scale of proven interventions to address female genital schistosomiasis (FGS) in Ghana, Ethiopia and Madagascar (the FAST Package). More details about her research can be found at the Threads Lab website.