Claire Keene

Dr Claire Keene completed her DPhil at St John’s College in 2024. She is a health systems researcher and the Deputy Director of the MSc in Health Service Improvement and Evaluation, under the Nuffield Department of Medicine’s Centre for Global Health Research at Oxford. She practiced as a doctor in South Africa before leaving clinical medicine by way of an MSc in International Health and Tropical Medicine at Oxford, then working for a large HIV and tuberculosis project at Médecins Sans Frontières. During the COVID pandemic, she led the MSF team that set up the first COVID-19 field hospital in South Africa.

Her current research explores people’s engagement with HIV care, predominantly in a South African public sector context; this includes understanding patterns of engagement over time, qualitatively exploring people’s experiences and perceptions of services, and testing the implementation of differentiated models of service delivery to support people who find engagement challenging. She is particularly interested in applying precision public health concepts to making service delivery more efficient and responsive to people’s needs.

Claire feels strongly about paying forward the help she has received along her path. She is excited to do this for the community that helped her through her DPhil at St John’s by working through the Women’s Network.