Ucheoma Nwaozuru, PhD

Ucheoma Nwaozuru, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Implementation, Division of Public Health Sciences at Wake Forest School of Medicine. She received a Master’s in Community Health and Preventive Medicine from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a PhD in Public Health Studies from Saint Louis University, College for Public Health and Social Justice.

Her research focuses on participatory and community-engaged research to promote the adoption and sustainability of evidence-based interventions. Her training and research experience has involved qualitative research methodology, community-based participatory research, crowdsourcing, and social innovations for health and the use of these principles to promote health equity, intervention adoption, and sustainability. She is a co-investigator on the Innovative Tools to Expand HIV Self-Testing (ITEST) project in Nigeria (MPI: Iwelunmor, Tucker, and Ezechi) that uses crowdsourcing open calls to promote the uptake of HIV self-testing among Nigerian youth. In this capacity, she facilitates the youth advisory board meetings and assists with implementing the crowdsourcing open call activities for Nigerian youth. She is currently leading a pilot study to examine decision-making for HPV vaccination among adolescent girls and young women in Nigeria.