Public Health Experience
Advisor & Consultant
Vanessa is the Founder, CEO, and lead data consultant of Chilombo Consulting. Chilombo Consulting and its team of data consultants provides human and equity-centered quantitative and qualitative data services. Past project deliverables include conducting and analyzing focus groups and in-depth interviews, conducting statistical analyses and writing results in APA format, wrangling, cleaning, and aggregating data for optimized use, designing and managing an interactive dashboard, writing mixed-methods evaluation reports, designing infographics, and creating visually pleasing mixed methods research presentations. We are proficient in R, Tableau, PowerBI, NVivo, Taugette, Excel, and Power Query, among others!
Vanessa previously worked as a Data Analysis Advisor (contractor) at USAID in the Bureau for Global Health, Office of HIV/AIDS. She also was a Data Manager and Analyst at CDC South Africa through the PHI/CDC Global Health Fellowship Program. In these roles she facilitated data management, analysis, visualization, and strategic data storytelling deliverables for President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR)-funded programs.
Speaker
Research
During graduate school, Vanessa worked in the Department of Epidemiology at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, and at the Rwanda Zambia HIV Research Group (RZHRG) where she assisted the research team in coordinating, designing, and implementing a Postpartum Long-Acting Reversible Contraception (LARC) Research Project and intervention in Kigali, Rwanda. She also worked as a Research Interviewer at the Georgia Emerging Infections Program at the Atlanta VA Medical Center, where she conducted active surveillance on food-borne illnesses, influenza, and healthcare-associated infections. Vanessa’s publications can be found here.
Grassroots Projects
Vanessa served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Rwanda, where she collaborated with staff at a local health center and Secondary school to implement projects in HIV/AIDS, Water, Hygiene, and Sanitation (WASH), malaria, literacy, and youth development. During and after her undergraduate program she worked on projects based in the U.S. as a Research Assistant in numerous organizations across different public health domains, including the Duke Global Health Institute (obesity prevention program), RTI International (alcohol and smoking behaviors), and the UNC Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research (aging and long-term care).
Career Services
Vanessa provides 1 on 1 career coaching via phone/video consultations. In 2019 Vanessa founded Chilombo Global Career Services, a full service career development platform designed to help students and professionals jumpstart their career search through resume revamps and other tailored services. Chilombo Careers was permanently closed in June 2023.