Dr. Gillian McKay is a nurse, global health practitioner and social scientist whose work examines how evidence is generated, interpreted and mobilised in humanitarian and epidemic settings. A 2016 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar, she completed her Doctor of Public Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in 2022, where her research focused on the integration of social and behavioural science into outbreak response and health emergency systems. Her work explored how knowledge, trust and power shape community engagement and the effectiveness of public health interventions.
Her research career spans both academia and operational settings. She has contributed to qualitative and mixed-methods research across West and Central Africa, including work with the World Health Organization during Ebola response efforts in North Kivu, DRC, and earlier humanitarian programming in Sierra Leone with GOAL. These experiences inform her ongoing interest in the political and ethical dimensions of health research in crisis contexts.
At Elrha’s Research for Health in Humanitarian Crises programme, she led and curated global research portfolios spanning climate and health, non-communicable diseases, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and outbreak response, supporting rigorous, policy-relevant research in partnership with local institutions. She now serves as Head of the Humanitarian “What Works” Centre, a joint initiative with the International Rescue Committee focused on synthesising and scaling evidence-based solutions across the humanitarian system.
Her work centres on equity, locally grounded research, and strengthening the pathways between knowledge and action in fragile settings.
Ebola outbreaks, community needs, response priorities: Case studies of community engagement in Ebola responses in Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
My doctoral research examined how knowledge, power and community agency shape epidemic response systems. Through two qualitative case studies of the 2014–2016 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone and the 2018–2020 outbreak in North Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo, I analysed how community perspectives were understood, operationalised and, at times, sidelined within formal outbreak response architectures.
The first case study explored women’s experiences of accessing gendered health services during the West African Ebola epidemic, using in-depth interviews to examine how fear, trust, caregiving roles and social norms shaped health-seeking behaviour in a context of severe system disruption. This work demonstrated how epidemic control measures intersect with existing gendered inequities, often amplifying barriers to care.
The second case study investigated the institutionalisation of “community feedback” mechanisms during the North Kivu Ebola response. Drawing on document analysis and interviews with humanitarian and public health actors, I traced how community-generated data moved (or stalled) within decision-making structures. This analysis highlighted tensions between technocratic outbreak control logics and participatory engagement approaches, and questioned assumptions that the mere collection of community feedback leads to meaningful responsiveness.
Together, the thesis argued that communities are not passive recipients of epidemic response but active knowledge producers. However, structural features of emergency governance often constrain how that knowledge is valued and acted upon. The work contributes to debates on community engagement, epistemic justice, and the integration of social and behavioural science within health emergency systems.
