
Dr. Holcombe is currently an Associate Fellow at the Bixby Center at the University of California, Berkeley. She began her career in public health with the Population and Community Development Association in Bangkok, Thailand, where she helped develop proposals and evaluate programs addressing the developing HIV/AIDS epidemic. Subsequently, at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, she contributed to development of measures of quality for health programs serving low-income populations as well as analyzed allied financing strategies. She has designed and led grant-making programs for reproductive health advocacy and services in Ethiopia, Mexico, and Sudan with the Packard Foundation, and developed and launched an East Africa grant-making program supporting community based provision of reproductive health services for the Bergstrom Foundation. She also directed and helped develop the Ellertson Postdoctoral Fellowship in Abortion and Reproductive Health. Her doctoral dissertation explored three facets of Ethiopia’s 2005 reform of its Penal Code with respect to abortion: agenda-setting and the factors underlying this reform, the roles of obstetrician-gynecologists in advancing reform of law, and the attitudes of midwives toward providing abortion care services. Her current research interests include medical professionals’ roles in policy reform; the politics and implementation of task-sharing; and strategies for measuring quality in community-based services and during scale-up of reproductive health services.