Juliet Iwelunmor
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Public Health & Epidemiology
Many cancers in Nigeria could be prevented with tools that already exist. Vaccines against human papillomavirus (HPV), a virus that causes cervical and other cancers, and hepatitis B virus (HBV), a major cause of liver cancer, are recommended and often free.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Social Science
- Topics
implementation science
cancer prevention
HPV vaccination
- Grants
- 6 known grants, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Develop youth-designed HPV vaccine campaigns using open calls, designathons and apprenticeships, then test whether they raise first-dose uptake among girls aged 9–15 in a stepped-wedge trial across 32 Nigerian communities.
- Gather pregnant women's preferences through crowdsourcing to design a hepatitis B birth-dose vaccination strategy, then compare it with printed guidelines in a cluster randomized trial at 36 community clinics.
- Use mixed methods and the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR), a model of what helps or blocks new programs, to find factors that shape vaccine uptake and whether programs are sustained one year later.
- Adapt a lateral flow HPV self-test based on loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) to detect HPV types 16, 18, 31, 35 and 52 at the point of care in Nigeria.
- Test whether a woman-designed HPV self-testing strategy increases cervical screening among 900 women aged 30–49 in 18 local government areas, using a stepped-wedge pragmatic randomized trial.
- Build and test a combined crowdsourced campaign for mother–daughter pairs that promotes HPV vaccination in daughters and HPV self-collection in mothers, and estimate its cost-effectiveness.
- Train yearly cohorts of Nigerian investigators in implementation science through a residential course, a virtual learning community, and seed grants for vaccine pilot projects.
More about the research
Screening can also catch cervical disease early. Yet few people use these services. This work studies implementation science: how to get proven health tools to the people who need them. It asks whether the communities themselves can design better ways to deliver these services. The main method is crowdsourcing, in which a group of people proposes solutions and the best ones are then put into practice. The projects test community-designed campaigns in randomized trials, and they also build a pool of Nigerian researchers who can lead this kind of work.
Why it matters
Nigeria carries a heavy burden of preventable cervical and liver cancers. This work could help more girls and newborns receive HPV and hepatitis B vaccines. It could also help more women get screened, using a cheap test they can do themselves. The trials will show which community-designed strategies raise uptake and keep running over time. The training core aims to build a lasting pool of Nigerian researchers. The findings may guide other low- and middle-income countries that are expanding vaccination and screening.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
D. Moon
Tulane University of Louisiana, LA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Test implementation best practices for a Screen & Treat program that uses self-collected HPV DNA testing, delivered within HIV care and treatment services at selected health facilities in Mozambique.
John Luque
Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, FL·Public Health & Epidemiology
Update a previously tested small-media promotora program of pamphlets and videos to improve Hispanic women's knowledge, beliefs and risk perception about cervical cancer and human papillomavirus (HPV).
Jean Hunleth
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Public Health & Epidemiology
Identify barriers and facilitators at multiple levels that shape HPV vaccination and primary cervical cancer prevention in rural, urban and peri-urban adolescent HIV clinics in Zambia.
The school
Washington University in St Louis: 97 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 365 research doctorates a year.
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