Malia Skjefte

DPhil Clinical Medicine, 2024
Clarendon Scholarship

A California native, Malia completed her undergraduate studies in Biology and Spanish at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2019. She sparked her interest in global health after interning for a summer in Spain with ISGlobal, a research group focused on malaria vaccines. Malia went on to earn a Master of Science in Global Health and Population from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. During her first semester, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic provided opportunities to contribute to several ongoing research projects, through which she developed core research skills.

After her Masters, she spent two years in Washington D.C., working as a Technical Advisor with Population Services international (PSI) in their Malaria Department. Before starting her DPhil, she lived in South America for a year as a Fulbright Scholar researching pathways for routine surveillance data management for Chagas disease.

Malia is currently in the second year of her DPhil and is based at the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU) in Bangkok, Thailand. Her DPhil work focuses on measuring the impact of interventions for the control and elimination of tropical infectious diseases, including malaria, dengue and Chagas. In the future, Malia hopes to return to the NGO sector and is open to pursuing policy work, as she believes this offers the most direct opportunity to see the day-to-day impact of her efforts.