Molly Forrest Franke, SD

Professor Franke is a global health researcher whose work brings the rigor of epidemiology to intractable infections (tuberculosis, cholera, HIV, SARS-CoV-2) and chronic diseases (diabetes, hypertension, depression). Her work has spanned a range of settings including Peru, Haiti, Rwanda, Lesotho, Papua New Guinea, and the United States.

Franke’s current work has two broad objectives. The first is to improve the health of children and adolescents affected by TB and HIV. She leads intervention work in Peru that aims to improve the treatment outcomes and overall well-being of adolescents and young adults living with HIV through the provision of community-based support and through youth-friendly modalities, such as social media. The second objective of her work is to ensure that care and treatment of health conditions that disproportionately affect the poor and socially marginalized are guided by the highest possible quality of evidence. To this end, she seeks to identify and apply the best epidemiologic methods for addressing critical knowledge gaps related to interventions and treatment.  Examples of her work in this area include the design of robust studies to assess the effectiveness of cholera interventions, including vaccination, and the use of causal inference-based approaches to study treatment for drug-resistant tuberculosis.