Amy Finnegan

Amy Finnegan is a social demographer whose work focuses on health behavior change communication in low-income settings and how the results of this research can feed into policy design and implementation. She received her PhD from the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University in 2016 and has been a Postdoctoral Associate at DGHI working with Eric Green since 2016; she also supports the Evidence Lab on impact modeling of social innovations. Her research has examined health behavior change in the domains of maternal and child health, reproductive behaviors, pediatric HIV disclosure, and parenting behaviors around harsh punishment. Within these domains, she has examined several relationships - within family social networks, community-level interventions, parents and their young and adolescent children and societal norms around timing of reproductive choices. She has taken on a number of empirical approaches in her work including randomized controlled trials, observational, population representative primary and secondary data, and qualitative analysis. She has worked in Zimbabwe, Liberia, Indonesia, Guatemala and Jordan. Her work has been supported by the NIH, the Information Initiative at Duke University, the Graduate School at Duke University and the Critical Languages Scholarship (CLS) from the US Department of State.

To start a conversation with me, ask: about my long-haired dachshund Bro.

Something interesting most people don't know about me: I was born and raised on a farm in South Dakota.