Deborah Collison

Nutrition MSPH’14

Monitoring and Evaluation Director, Project HOPE

Deborah Collison is originally from Ghana and came to the US to study maternal and child health nutrition at Rollins. While in graduate school, she worked with Professor Amy Webb-Girard, one of the core MCH faculty, to implement an innovative feeding toolkit for a child’s first 1000 days featuring a bowl with markings to indicate the appropriate quantity of food, a slotted spoon, and information cards. This experience exposed her to global monitoring and evaluation and enabled her to travel to India and Kenya.

Collison increased the global scope of her career after graduating, working at FHI 360, CARE USA, and ICF on nutrition-related data collection and capacity building across many different countries. Recently, Collison became the Monitoring and Evaluation Director at Project HOPE, a global health nonprofit. In this role, Collison provides technical assistance in data collection, assessment, evaluation, and dissemination for all projects. She has spent the last several months working on COVID-19 vaccination training programs for healthcare workers in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, through a collaboration between Project HOPE and the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies at the Watson Institute of Brown University.

While Collison focused on nutrition at Rollins, she is happy to do monitoring and evaluation work in any area. Her passion lies in building evidence to improve interventions for vulnerable populations, “I get excited about little wins in everything that I do,” she said, “seeing that a project is measured well makes me happy.” She credits the quantitative and qualitative research skills she developed at Rollins as preparing her for these roles. Collison is also currently pursuing a Doctor of Public Health Leadership at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Collison’s advice to MCH trainees is to network and ask for help, particularly from fellow students. Collison fondly remembers the connections she made with her classmates while at Rollins, and she gives back by helping current students secure professional opportunities. When Collison is not traveling globally, she can be found biking, doing yoga, or spending time with family and friends.