Deputy Director, Center for Innovation in Global Health & Program Director, Blantyre Prevention Strategy
Sara M. Allinder is Deputy Director of the Center for Innovation in Global Health at Georgetown University and Program Director of the Blantyre Prevention Strategy (BPS). Ms. Allinder oversees BPS strategic planning and implementation across the BPS consortium of partners, and lends her programmatic, policy, management, and technical expertise to BPS learning dissemination and adaptation. She is co-investigator for two objectives of Malawi’s Injectable PrEP PathtoScale study and serves on the Product Access Advisory Committee (PAAC) for Maximizing Options to Advance Informed Choice for HIV Prevention (MOSAIC), a five-year project funded by the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) to accelerate introduction and scale-up of new and emerging biomedical prevention products.
Ms. Allinder has extensive experience in global health, foreign policy, international development, human rights, and program management. She currently is an expert advisor (new window) to Pharos Global Health Advisors and authored country case studies on Malawi and Haiti included in a 2022 evaluation conducted for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria (GF) focused on the 2020 cohort of COVID-19 Response Mechanism (C19RM) grants and a 2021 thematic review of GF’s role in pandemic preparedness and response (PPR).
Previously, she was Executive Director and Senior Fellow in the Global Health Policy Center (GHPC) at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) from 2016-2020. In addition to leading GHPC’s work on HIV, Ms. Allinder supported activities on nutrition, other infectious diseases, global health security, and women’s and family health; and was a frequent host of its Take as Directed and AIDS 2020 podcasts. She retains a CSIS Senior Associate (non-resident) affiliation and is a fellow of CSIS’s 2023 Global Women’s Leadership Program.
Prior to joining CSIS, she worked for more than a decade on the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in Washington and in Uganda where she served as Country Coordinator of the $353 million PEPFAR program (2013-15). She led preparation of the 2013-15 Country Operational Plan (COPs), advised the Ambassador, contributed to the response to the Anti-Homosexuality Act, led development of Uganda’s DREAMS strategy targeting adolescent girls and young women, and revitalized engagement with civil society organizations. In four stints at the Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator and Health Diplomacy, U.S. Department of State (2003-16), Ms. Allinder was a senior advisor on PEPFAR management, operations, and policy issues.
In earlier roles at the U.S. Department of State, Ms. Allinder was policy adviser in the Office of International Health Affairs, where she led the policy response to the SARS and Avian Flu outbreaks, and served as senior editor for Africa of the human rights and international religious freedom reports in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor as a Presidential Management Fellow.
Ms. Allinder holds a Master of Public Policy, concentration in International Development and Health, and a Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, in Political Science and Sociology, both from The American University, Washington, DC. She is currently a Doctor of Public Health candidate at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health.
Could a Systems Approach be the Disruptor Needed in HIV Prevention?
December 1st, 2020
Business as usual is not working in HIV prevention. The latest UNAIDS data from 2019 demonstrates that we are collectively failing to bring down the number of new infections globally. Despite…
