Associate Professor Jill Olivier

Associate Professor Jill Olivier

Division of Health Policy and Systems

School of Public Health and Family Medicine

 

 

Tel:  021 406 6489

 

 

 

 

 

Assoc Prof Jill Olivier is a South African and UCT alumni, graduating with a PHD from the Humanities Faculty – after which she worked in varied sectors, including as a consultant at the World Bank in Washington DC, before returning to SA and UCT. She splits her time between teaching and research. On the teaching front she runs courses on Health Systems and Health Systems Research; convenes two tracks of the Masters in Public Health programme (the Health Systems and General Tracks); and has a passion for mentoring students through their degree journey, supervising masters and PHD students.

On the research front she is committed to Southern and engaged scholarship – and has experience as a researcher and research manager in countries across Africa, the Asia-Pacific region and the Americas – holding a South African National Research Foundation B-rating. She is currently the Principal Investigator of several large multi-country grants, including a grant from the WHO (on non-state providers in Ghana), and another from the UK MRC (on health system responsiveness in SA and Kenya). She calls herself an interdisciplinary researcher, and brings her social science and humanities expertise to public health, and health policy and systems research (HPSR). She has a particular interest in scholarship in areas of ‘intersection’ (between sectors, between system and communities, and between disciplines). Her current work focuses on topics such as non-profit non-state health providers; intersectionality; health systems resilience and responsiveness; community system strengthening; health system histories; and communication and cultures within health systems.