[TimorLesteStudies] [phd studentship

[Simon P J Batterbury]

PhD opportunity in Water, Sanitation and Hygiene

The PhD proposal is nested inside an NHMRC-funded study (with partners at the University of Queensland and the NGO WaterAid) to take place in Liquiçá District in East Timor. The main study is a cluster-randomised trial asking whether adding a Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) process increases the effectiveness of a programme of regular de-worming with albendazole. The intervention will be randomised by village, with some villages getting the CLTS programme at the beginning of the study and others at the end. (Those villages no getting the CLTS programme till the end of the study will act as the controls.)
The main study will be run by a group led by Dr Archie Clements from the University of Queensland, and the CLTS programme will be run by WaterAid Australia. In essence the PhD project will look at the CLTS programme itself, quite separately from the main project. The research questions will relate to the factors (at individual and village level) that either facilitate or hinder the uptake of the CLTS message. The actual description of this part of the study is appended at the end of this document.
 
We expect the PhD will use "mixed methods" - some quantitative and some qualitative components. We hope that it will provide strong research training to someone with an engineering background whose future career will include a strong academic component: facilitating the creation of new evidence that will help improve water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) programmes throughout the Asia-Pacific region. (Perhaps something along the lines of Prof Sandy Cairncross of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine - http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/people/cairncross.sandy.)
 
The PhD candidate will be enrolled at the Nossal Institute for Global Health at the University of Melbourne, and will be supervised by Associate Professor Jim Black and Dr Martha Morrow. Jim is a medical graduate with a long history of work in developing countries (mostly in Mozambique but including half a year in East Timor) and Martha is a qualitative researcher with more than 20 years experience in South-East Asia, especially Vietnam. The research costs and an NHMRC-equivalent stipend are available in the project budget.
We hope this will be just the first of several PhDs on WASH topics at the Nossal Institute in the coming years, as we help build Australia's capacity in the area.
 
For more information, contact A/Prof Jim Black: jim.black at unimelb.edu.au.