Patience Muwanguzi, PhD

Patience A. Muwanguzi, Ph. D is a lecturer and head of the Nursing department, in the college of health sciences at Makerere University, and research director at the African center for health equity research and innovation, in Uganda. Dr. Muwanguzi received her doctorate in health sciences from the University of Leeds (UK) and master’s degree in critical care from Mbarara University of Science and Technology, Uganda. She was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. She completed a fellowship in global health leadership from the Afya Bora Consortium, with a focus on redefining male involvement in the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV.  

Dr. Muwanguzi’s research will employ the RE-AIM (reach, effectiveness, adoption, implementation, maintenance) framework to evaluate community-based differentiated antiretroviral therapy (DART) services delivery interventions, at designated drop-in-centers for key population groups that are particularly vulnerable to HIV in Uganda. Her overarching goal is to identify scalable and sustainable DART delivery models for persons newly starting HIV treatment, those with opportunistic infections and/or co-morbidities and those with unsuppressed viral loads. Her work also involves partnerships with community-based organizations in stigma-reduction approaches to improve equitable access to healthcare, medicines, and vaccines for key populations. In collaboration with colleagues and senior researchers, Dr. Muwanguzi has led and conducted clinical trials on behavioral, and mHealth strategies to engage men at their work settings in HIV testing, prevention, and care. She has also been involved in modelling the potential impact of HIV self-testing among men and key populations in decreasing the HIV epidemic. During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Uganda, she led a team that tracked and modelled patient trends at high-volume emergency care centers. She is currently team-lead for an implementation project designing a prototype low-cost emergency call and dispatch center for low-resource settings.