Jessie Seiler

Jessie Seiler received her PhD in Epidemiology at the University of Washington. She served as a Peace Corps Volunteer and later worked with USAID in Senegal, where her focus was on malaria. Jessie has also worked in behavior change communications with domestic and global health non-profits and the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention. She earned her MPH from the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, where her research interests coalesced around humanitarian emergencies and race- and gender-based violence.

Jessie worked on twenty projects during her four-year engagement at START, acting as the Project Manager for 10 of them. Jessie was also a Student Representative for the START RAs. Below are highlights from two of the projects Jessie worked on:

• Social media behavior change review: In spite of the wealth of evidence regarding effective behavior change techniques when using digital interventions to target residents of high-income countries (HICs), there is limited information of a similar nature for lower- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The goal of this review was to identify and describe the available literature regarding effective social media-based behavior change interventions within LMICs. We conducted a systematic review in concordance with the 2009 Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines in order to understand what behavioral interventions have been implemented using social media in LMICs, as well as to characterize the evidence of their effectiveness.
• MNCH Home Births: The START team conducted a literature review, a dataset review, and key informant interviews to research the differential mortality outcomes between facility and home births and related home birth interventions, first in India, Ethiopia, and Nigeria, and then in other geographies in sub-Saharan African and South Asia.

Reflecting on her time at START, Jessie said, “My time at the START Center was a gift. I got to dive deep into research questions that would never have been on my radar otherwise, and I know that work my teams and I did shaped decisions that improved lives around the world through our relationship with the Gates Foundation. I also learned critical professional skills related to consulting, project management, and maintaining client relationships. And of course I got to work with some inspiring and brilliant peers.”