As a certified nurse-midwife and program manager, Laura Fitzgerald has 20 years of technical and programmatic experience in HIV prevention, health systems strengthening, nursing and midwifery, and reproductive and maternal health. Currently, as a Senior Program Advisor for Jhpiego Myanmar, Ms. Fitzgerald provides strategic leadership, operations, and quality assurance support across seven Jhpiego programs and day-to-day support to project leaders to ensure alignment with government and donor guidance in order to meet project deliverables successfully. During the five years in which she supported programs to introduce and scale-up biomedical HIV prevention programs in southern Africa, Ms. Fitzgerald formed and maintained successful working relationships with Ministries of Health, other government agencies, partner NGOs, and local and US-based PEPFAR managers, conducted Eswatini’s first-ever national nurse quantification surveillance, worked with the Eswatini Nursing Association, the Eswatini Nursing Council, and universities to source 300 nurses for an accelerated voluntary medical male circumcision campaign, and provided primary technical assistance for the early infant component of Eswatini’s 2014 – 2018 Male Circumcision Strategy. She also authored Jhpiego’s technical update series on maternal health and infectious diseases, and Jhpiego’s global implementation guidance on clinical mentorship. Ms. Fitzgerald supports programs in Tanzania and Myanmar to implement clinical mentoring programs for frontline health workers in Safe Surgery, maternal, newborn, and child health, and maintaining essential services in the setting of COVID-19. Laura has lived in Malawi, Tanzania, Eswatini, Pakistan, and Myanmar and is currently based in the US with her husband and two young daughters.
