Amanda Kalamar

Amanda Kalamar is an associate II and technical director for Breakthrough-RESEARCH at the Population Council. Breakthrough RESEARCH catalyzes social and behavior change (SBC) by conducting state-of-the-art research and evaluation and promoting evidence-based solutions to improve health and development programs around the world. In her role, Kalamar works to ensure the successful implementation and monitoring of research activities and technical agendas, with a focus on dissemination and uptake of key project findings by implementing partners and the SBC community.

Before joining the Council, Kalamar was the senior research advisor for sexual and reproductive health at Population Services International. While there, she led PSI’s global SRH research agenda, providing technical leadership and quality oversight to an organizational reproductive health research portfolio across 35 countries. She managed research teams to design and implement quantitative and qualitative studies, programmatic evaluations, and implementation research studies and led departmental strategic research, evidence, and measurement agendas. She also served as the research advisor for the USAID-funded SIFPO2 project and led the Evidence and Learning Working Group of the Self-Care Trailblazers, a consortium of more than 35 global partners dedicated to advancing national self-care agendas by building the nascent evidence base and translating evidence and learning into policy and practice. She spearheaded PSI’s quality-of-care data utilization initiative designed to translate research and evaluation data into actionable insights to design and improve programs.

Kalamar has published extensively using qualitative and quantitative methods to understand the lived experiences of women and men and the influences on their health behaviors. She has worked in several countries including Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, and Malawi.

Kalamar has a PhD in public health: population, family, and reproductive health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.