Maria Kim

For the past fifteen years, I have worked as a pediatrician, researcher, educator, and public health practitioner focused on designing, delivering & evaluating interventions to improve outcomes for children and families affected by HIV in Malawi. I am the Co-Founding Director of Tingathe (meaning "together we can" in the local Chichewa language), a program which has been supporting HIV and psychosocial programming and implementation research at >120 health facilities in Malawi. In this role, I secured funding for and managed a portfolio of clinical and research programming (KO1, RO1), as well as a research fellowship program that sought to support and develop young scientists in Malawi. I led some of the first studies in Malawi examining adolescent depression, healthcare worker burnout, intimate partner violence, adverse childhood events, and the impact of a tele-mental health support program. I also served for the past six years as the Research and Implementation Director for the USAID funded Technical Support program, which sought to apply best practices and lessons learned from our programming in Malawi to improve policy and HIV care and treatment implementation in nine other Sub-Saharan African countries. Now, with further clinical and research training in psychiatry, I hope to build on this foundation to explore novel interventions in psychiatry and further promote access to critical mental health services in resource limited settings around the globe.