Simone Carter is currently working in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), leading UNICEF’s Social Science Analytics Cell (CASS) for outbreaks. She is also UNICEF’s lead on Integrated Multidisciplinary Outbreak Analytics for the Public Health Emergencies team in Geneva, where she provides support to countries in their use of evidence in outbreak response.
Simone joined the Eastern DRC Ebola outbreak response in September 2018, where she, under the strategic coordination for the Ministry of Health (MOH), developed, set up, and managed the CASS, which is now operational for Ebola, COVID and cholera. This is the first time that such a structure has existed in outbreaks: providing real time social and behavioral analysis data in an integrated and coherent way to systematically influence the response.
Simone has a Masters of Science in Epidemiology from the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Medicine where she focused her research on understanding HIV treatment attrition among sex workers in Uganda trucking centers. Following her field research, she has spent the last 10 years working across Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East in humanitarian response and interventions; of which she spent 6 years working for Oxfam’s rapid response team leading the humanitarian and public health emergency response. Since 2014, in the West Africa Ebola outbreak, she has specifically supported on operational research to inform program response, aiming to improve accountability to communities through evidence.
Simone leads the global Analytics for Operations working group which aims to support different organizations and country teams in collaboration with academic, government and operational actors to ensure that social sciences research can be used to influence outbreak response. She is dedicated to ensuring that research and data are gender inclusive, using evidence for advocacy and raising the voices of women and children in public health emergencies.