Eileen Yam

Eileen Yam is a social and behavioral scientist with two decades of experience leading equity-centered applied research to improve social and health policies and programs. She has subject matter expertise in HIV, sexual and reproductive health, adolescent and youth health, and gender in lower- and middle-income countries.

Before joining Mathematica in 2023, Yam worked with the Population Council in its Mexico and Washington, DC, offices, where she served as deputy director of USAID's flagship HIV implementation science project, Project SOAR (Supporting Operational AIDS Research), which aimed to generate and use evidence as well as strengthen host-country research capacity to improve the HIV response in more than 20 countries. She also led the research portfolio of Link Up, an initiative to improve the lives of young people most affected by HIV in Bangladesh, Burundi, Ethiopia, Myanmar, and Uganda, supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. As an analyst with Abt Associates, she was the monitoring and evaluation manager for USAID’s Private Sector Partnerships-One project, which focused on increasing the role of the private sector in providing family planning and other health products. As research and evaluation specialist with the International Center for Research on Women, she provided monitoring and evaluation technical assistance to Nike Foundation and Gap, Inc.

Yam also has a strong interest in translating and communicating health information for diverse audiences across various media. She was a freelance health writer for A. Magazine: Inside Asian America, and editorial researcher for National Geographic Magazine. Her work also has been published in high-impact peer-reviewed journals such as Lancet Global Health, Journal of Adolescent Health, and PLOS One. In addition, she served as senior content designer for the digital fertility benefits provider, Carrot Fertility, where she collaborated with subject matter experts, product designers, and engineers to develop health education content related to family forming and fertility. Yam holds a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.