Nina was awarded the Tammy Chen Memorial Scholarship 2024-2025.
Nina Acharya is a PhD student at the University of Oxford studying the political economy of multilateral global health aid. She is in her second year of the programme at Oxford’s Department of Social Policy and Intervention.
Originally from Ottawa, Nina completed her BSc in Human Biology, Health and Society at Cornell University. During her undergraduate degree, she developed an interest in global health while working with the Mehta Research Group. Her honours thesis examined the adherence to latitude-based vitamin D supplementation guidelines among healthcare workers in a tertiary care pediatric hospital. In her final year she was named a Merrill Presidential Scholar – an honour awarded to the top 1% of the graduating class for excellence in academics and extracurriculars.
Following graduation, Nina worked at Global Affairs Canada in the Global Health and Nutrition Bureau as a junior policy analyst. She credits this role with igniting her love of foreign policy. She has returned to this role several times – in 2020, 2021 and longer term over 2022-2023. Initially working on Canada’s nutrition assistance, she moved to the COVID-19 Global Health Response Taskforce, assisting on Canada’s commitment to providing equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics.
In 2020, Nina began her master’s in Development Studies at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Inspired by her work at Global Affairs, she completed a thesis examining the political economy of the COVAX Facility. This work motivated her to conduct further research on the ways in which donors and recipients interact within global health, and how distributions of power ultimately can affect health outcomes.
Nina’s PhD research examines how international health priorities translate into specific projects and policy objectives in national and sub-national settings via international assistance channels. Her work takes the example of COVID-19 control, and examines how donor priorities, such as disease surveillance and vaccination, were operationalised throughout hundreds of aid projects over the nearly three years of the pandemic. Looking at case studies of Zambia and Senegal, Nina’s work seeks to understand how donor objectives and recipient health needs interact in practice, and how the distribution of aid impacts overall health service delivery in resource-limited settings.
In addition to her academic pursuits, Nina is the co-founder of the Canadian Science Fair Journal, a virtual STEM mentorship programme for students ages 12-18. Following her time in Oxford, she hopes to return to Ottawa to pursue a career in foreign affairs, while continuing to advocate for the implementation of evidence-based international assistance policy.
