Dr Leane Ramsoomar is a Senior Specialist Scientist at the Gender and Health Research Unit at the South African Medical Research Council. She holds a PhD in Public Health and has 23 years’ experience in health promotion and public health research and implementation. Her work focuses on alcohol and other drug use, violence against women and girls, the intersections between alcohol and intimate partner violence.

Leane has served as faculty at leading South African universities, including the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Pretoria, and as a guest lecturer at the University of Johannesburg.

From 2016 to 2019, she was Research Uptake Manager for the global UK-AID–funded What Works to Prevent Violence against Women and Girls programme. In this role, she led a comprehensive research translation strategy across 13 countries and 15 interventions in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, supporting the dissemination and use of evidence to influence policy, programming, and funding, while strengthening capacity for evidence-informed decision-making.

Leane currently leads work on alcohol use and its intersections with violence against women and girls and co-led the development of South Africa’s first National Integrated Strategy on the Prevention of Femicide. She is the principal investigator on a study examining the impact of protection orders for women experiencing severe intimate partner violence, co-principal investigator on a project assessing Risk assessment and Safety planning for female survivors of GBV, and a co-investigator on both the FEDISA Modikologo (End the Cycle) and the CHASE-SA project.