Lori Heise

Lori Heise is Director of the Gender, Violence, and Health Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her career in women’s health and HIV/AIDS spans more than three decades and bridges the worlds of research, policy, and civil society engagement. She is an internationally recognized expert on the dimensions, causes and prevention of violence against women and children and served on the core research team of the WHO Multi-country study on Women’s Health and Domestic Violence. Currently, she is co-Research Director of STRIVE, an international research consortium dedicated to studying the structural drivers of HIV, including gender inequalities, stigma, lack of livelihood options and harmful alcohol use and drinking norms. She also is Co-PI of “What Works?” a 5 year, DFID-funded initiative to generate evidence on strategies to prevent violence against women and girls. Her own research focuses on how to transform and measure the role of norms and non-social beliefs in maintaining violence against women and children. As part of this effort, she leads the Learning Initiative on Norms and Abuse (LINEA), a research and action project on sexual exploitation and abuse of children.
Prior to joining LSHTM, she spearheaded a 20-year effort to address the HIV prevention needs of women. As founding Director of the Global Campaign for Microbicides (GCM), she built an international network of advocates working to expand HIV prevention options and to encourage ethical research that involves communities and civil society.