About me
I graduated nursing from the University of Malta with first class honours in 2011. Following this I studied a Master's degree in Global Health at Karolinska Institutet for one year. I spent two years working as a research assistant in the research group 'Medicines in the Health System - focussing on antibiotics' where I was involved in projects on surgical site infections and other related healthcare-associated infections in India, as well as the development of a course on the 'Development, Implementation and Evaluation of Antibiotic Use Campaigns' in collaboration with the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), among others.
As a doctoral student at the Department of Global Public Health, under the supervision of Professor Cecilia Stålsby Lundborg, and co-supervisors, Dr Senia Rosales-Klintz, Prof Michael A. Borg and Dr Anna Nyberg, I designed, implemented and evaluated a social marketing intervention aimed at improving general practitioners' antibiotic prescribing for respiratory tract complaints in Malta. The project entitled the Maltese Antibiotic Stewardship Programme in the Community (MASPIC), was conducted between 2014 and 2018.
I currently work as a project manager and qualitative researcher at the Evaluation Sciences Unit at Stanford University's Department of Medicine. I support the implementation and evaluation of quality improvement projects conducted within Stanford Health Care.
Education
- Bachelor's degree in nursing studies (BSc (Hons) Nursing) from the University of Malta, Malta; 2011
- Master's degree in global health (MMSc (Global Health)) from Karolinska Institutet, Sweden; 2012
- Doctoral degree from Karolinska Institutet, Sweden; 2020
Academic honours, awards and prizes
- Awardee of the Strategic Education Pathways Scholarship (STEPS); 2011
- Judge’s runner up award and the People’s choice award at the 2019 Hackathon in Stockholm. In the Joint Programming Initiative on Antimicrobial Resistance Hackathon: Using the digital world to fight antimicrobial resistance, I was part of a team that developed a prototype for “The waiting room game”, an educational role-playing game that helps people learn about the simple actions they can take in their daily lives to help combat antibiotic resistance together with facts about antibiotics and antibiotic resistance.