Rita Wanjuki Njeru

Rita joined ETHOX in October 2020. Her DPhil is supported by a Nuffield Department of Population Health Scholarship and she is supervised by Professors Maureen Kelley and Sassy Molyneux. Her work is around creating an evidence base for ethical and equitable access to human milk for vulnerable infants in resource-limited settings, through an empirical ethics study. 

Before joining ETHOX, Rita worked as a research assistant in the REACH project in Kenya at the KEMRI Wellcome Trust Research Programme (KWTRP). REACH is a collaborative multicounty, multidisciplinary study aimed at improving research ethical guidance for research with vulnerable populations though documenting contextual accounts of vulnerability and tracing ethical issues in already approved studies. She worked in a Kenyan case study- the Childhood Acute Illnesses and Nutrition (CHAIN) network’s multicounty cohort study- aimed at creating an evidence base to support care for undernourished children and develop interventions to reduce post-hospital discharge mortality. She has also worked on the KEMRI’s Schools Engagement Programme, and in a health policy study aimed at assessing the implementation of the free maternity policy in Kenya. 

Her research interests span maternal and child health, health systems and ethics. In particular she is interested in how to ethically implement health interventions aimed at improving outcomes for women and children. Rita holds an MSc in international Health and Tropical Medicine from the University of Oxford; a Postgraduate Diploma in Health Research Methods offered collaboratively between KWTRP and Pwani University, Kilifi Kenya; and a BSc in Environmental Health from Kenyatta University Kenya.