Lara Vaz

Lara joined the Save the Children and the Saving Newborn Lives team in January 2013 as the Senior M&E Advisor. Lara has nearly 20 years of experience in public health programming, monitoring and evaluation, and over 10 years of experience in implementation research in resource-limited settings. She began her career working on community mobilization, health promotion and health education in low-income immigrant Latino settings in the US, and became engaged in Monitoring and Evaluation because of her interest in documenting the evidence from program implementation. Since then, Lara has been engaged in program implementation, research, and monitoring and evaluation, as well in global policy and indicator development with WHO and other key partners,. She has worked in Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Botswana, Haiti, Tanzania, South Africa, Kenya, and most recently in India, Uganda and Nigeria. While her last 3 years have been focused in neonatal health, Lara previously worked across the spectrum of HIV/AIDS program, from prevention to treatment to mitigation. Lara’s PhD in Health Behavior & Health Education from the University of North Carolina focused on the experiences of serostatus disclosure to HIV-infected children in the context of scale-up of antiretroviral treatment. She holds a Masters of Science in Health Policy and Management from Harvard and a BA from Stanford University in International Relations. Raised as a global nomad, Lara is fluent in Portuguese, French and Spanish, and rusty in Swahili and Lingala; in her spare time, she enjoys photography and dancing to almost anything, but especially salsa and cha cha.