Wezzie Lora is a Medical Anthropologist with over 10 years’ of work experience in Social Science in health research. She is currently a Post-doctoral Research Associate at the Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Programme where she leads research focusing on HIV research, biomedical technologies, pandemic preparedness, and resilience. Much of her work has been on understanding the relationship between individuals and biomedical technologies employing various research designs like qualitative research and mixed research methods and has directly impacted public health and informed global and national policies and guidelines. Her research has included general, vulnerable, and marginalised populations in rural and urban settings. Through her expertise, Wezzie has been involved in a number of multi-sited studies and contributes to multi-disciplinary teams. Wezzie is also an honorary faculty member at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, where she provides supervision to MSc and PhD students and teaches the MSc Public Health course.
Wezzie is currently involved in the AMETHIST study implemented in Malawi, Zimbabwe and South Africa. In this study, Wezzie is leading the research activities in Malawi to understand the context and patterns of sex work and transitions into and out of sex work. The outcomes of this study will provide a better understanding of sex work and the development of an intervention for female sex workers in Malawi, and in similar settings.