Mary de Boer

I am a maternal and child nutrition researcher with expertise in nutritional epidemiology, implementation science, and environmental health. My work focuses on understanding heterogeneity in health outcomes among pregnant women in low- and middle-income countries — specifically, why evidence-based interventions fail to reach or benefit the most vulnerable subgroups. I use mixed methods combining traditional nutritional epidemiology with spatial analysis, multilevel and structural equation modeling, latent class analysis, and qualitative approaches to understand both biological and structural drivers of that heterogeneity. I come to academic research after 14 years as a field-based public health practitioner in Sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia within the USAID Foreign Service.