
Divya received her doctorate degree in epidemiology at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health in 2014 and between 2011 and 2014 served as a Bixby Doctoral Fellow. She worked on several capacity-building projects for community-based public health organizations before coming to UC Berkeley, where she earned her MPH in epidemiology and biostatistics in 2011. As an MPH student, she worked on research projects related to reproductive health and relationship violence in India and Tanzania. Later as a Bixby Doctoral Fellow, Divya conducted fieldwork in Angola and contributed to the design and analysis of ongoing Bixby projects. During her doctoral studies, Divya decided to learn Portuguese, which allowed her to successfully conduct qualitative interview on sensitive health topics in Angola. Her research interests include family planning, gender-based violence, and social determinants of reproductive health, and her dissertation focuses on how women’s reproductive health decisions and outcomes are influenced by their families and communities. She has gone on to work at Mathematica Policy Research where she conducts research focused on global health projects.