Dr. Joseph KB Matovu is a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Disease Control and Environmental Health at Makerere University School of Public Health. He is a Social and Behavioral Epidemiologist by training.
He holds a Ph.D in Public Health from Makerere University; a Master of Health Science in International Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA; and a Bachelor of Arts in Social Work and Social Administration (SWSA) from Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda.
Matovu has experience in the design and implementation of social, behavioral, and epidemiologic research; he is the author of ~109 peer-reviewed scientific papers; he is a peer reviewer for many international scientific journals; he is an Associate Editor with AIDS and Behaviour and BMC Public Health journals; and he is an Academic Editor with PLoS ONE.
Additionally, he is a Commonwealth Professional Fellow at the PRIMENT Clinical Trials Unit, University College London, UK, and a Career Development Fellow supported by the European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP). Dr. Matovu’s research interests include HIV/AIDS (with a particular focus on HIV testing and linkage to HIV care, sexual risk behaviour, HIV incidence, male circumcision for HIV prevention), sexual and reproductive health (with a particular focus on adolescent sexual and reproductive health, fertility desire, and family planning), social and behaviour change communication (SBCC), migration health, urban health, implementation science, and impact evaluation. Dr. Matovu is passionate about the integration of social and behavioural sciences into epidemiologic research. His research has particularly focused on married couples, men, adolescent girls and young women, adolescent boys and young men, female sex workers, truck drivers, and men who have sex with men.
He is the Principal Investigator of the Adolescent Girls and Young Women (AGYW) study, a national survey being conducted in 20 districts of Uganda to collect data on risk behaviors, access to and utilization of sexual and reproductive health services, and determine the sero-prevalence of HIV and syphilis among AGYW. He is also a co-Principal Investigator of the Adolescent Boys and Young Men Study and a co-investigator on the Research for Scalable Solutions (R4S) Project, a five-year, USAID-funded project. He is currently doing research on HIV in Uganda