Kat Tumlinson
Ph.D., Associate Professor (she/hers), Health Policy and Management
ktumlin@email.unc.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Google Scholar Profile
PubMed Publications
ORCID iD
Katherine Tumlinson (she/her) studies how health systems can better support people in obtaining contraceptive care that aligns with their preferences. Her research examines provider behavior, service quality, accountability, and commodity availability, with a focus on the barriers that arise within healthcare facilities. She works primarily in sub-Saharan Africa, using mixed-methods and experimental research to improve person-centered family planning care and support contraceptive autonomy.
Dr. Katherine Tumlinson (she/her) is an epidemiologist and demographer whose work sits at the intersection of population health, global reproductive health, health systems, and contraceptive autonomy. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and a faculty member at the Carolina Population Center. Her research focuses on how family planning service quality, provider behavior, health-system accountability, and commodity availability shape contraceptive access, method preference, and reproductive autonomy.
Dr. Tumlinson has served as principal investigator on studies in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, including large-scale household surveys, facility-based assessments, provider interviews, client exit interviews, mystery client studies, unannounced facility visits, qualitative interviews, and cluster randomized trials. Her work has examined how provider-imposed restrictions, informal fees, disrespectful care, absenteeism, method denial, and supply constraints can limit access to high-quality contraceptive services. She has also developed and applied measures of whether contraceptive use is aligned with individuals’ stated preferences, helping shift attention beyond conventional measures of contraceptive uptake toward whether people are able to obtain and use the methods they actually want.
Her current research portfolio includes experimental and mixed-methods studies of social accountability, person-centered contraceptive care, provider behavior, and medical commodity availability. In Kenya, she recently led a large cluster randomized trial evaluating Community Score Card and Citizen Report Card interventions across public-sector facilities in Kisumu County, examining effects on contraceptive use, preferred method use, and other dimensions of reproductive autonomy. In Madagascar, she led a cluster randomized trial of drone-based delivery of essential medical commodities to remote public-sector health facilities. That study showed that drones could reliably reach remote facilities but did not meaningfully reduce most stockouts or improve contraceptive access, underscoring the importance of upstream information, ordering, and supply-system constraints. Her ongoing work also uses the Multiphase Optimization Strategy to develop and test scalable, cost-informed interventions addressing provider values, motivation, workplace norms, and mentorship as drivers of family planning service quality and receipt of preferred contraceptive methods.
Before entering academia, Dr. Tumlinson worked as a family planning service provider and reproductive health educator. These experiences continue to inform her applied research agenda and her commitment to producing research that is useful for health systems, program implementers, and policy makers. Across her work, she uses rigorous quantitative methods, integrated qualitative approaches, implementation science, economic evaluation, and sustained collaboration with in-country partners to ensure that research questions, measures, and dissemination strategies are grounded in local priorities and responsive to the needs of the people and health systems her work aims to support.
Associated Projects
- Delivering on Universal Health Coverage Promises in Madagascar
- Improving dialogue and accountability with a youth-led community score card in Western Kenya
- Non-Preferred Contraceptive Method Use in Low-Resourced Settings: Exploring Inappropriate Medical Contraindications and Person-Centered Care
- Randomized Controlled Trial to Address Unintended Pregnancy Rates in Low Resource Settings
- Service Delivery Factors Influencing Contraceptive Use Dynamics in Developing Countries: A Mixed-Methods and Cross-Disciplinary Approach