Dr. Mahlet (pronounced MAA-HAA-LATE) is a Senior Program Officer in the Gender Equality Division at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington. She is based in the Data and Insights Team under Gender Impact Accelerators, where she leads the team’s efforts to streamline platforms for primary data collection, user insights, and analytics to fill gender data gaps, strengthen the data and modeling ecosystem for issues affecting women and girls, and inform policy decision-making. She has lived and conducted research and evaluations in various countries including Ethiopia, Uganda, and India and has over 12 years of experience working with local communities on a range of global health topics, including safer conception among HIV-affected individuals, transgenerational impacts of war-time sexual violence, barriers to family planning, including in humanitarian settings and emergencies, and health systems strengthening for global health security. Dr. Mahlet is also passionate about mental health and provides technical assistance to research groups in low-income countries and military veteran service organizations. She received her PhD from the Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School in California and an MPH from École des Hautes Études en Santé Publique in Paris. Dr. Mahlet grew up in a multi-lingual household in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and speaks a few languages, including Amharic, French, and Somali.
