Dr Arantxa Roca Feltrer

Doctor Arantxa Roca-Feltrer is a PhD malaria epidemiologist trained at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) with over 20 years of experience in both malaria control and malaria elimination countries from the African and Asian regions. During that time she has supported malaria programmes by providing strategic technical input, technical oversight and quality assurance on a range of areas including study design, implementation and operational research, monitoring and evaluation, surveillance, epidemiology and capacity building. She possesses a solid academic background gained through her trainings (MSc and PhD) at the LSHTM, seven years teaching, designing and implementing research at LSHTM, and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine where she spent five years in Malawi.

From 2012 to 2016 Doctor Roca-Feltrer supported malaria elimination efforts in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS), particularly with a focus on strengthening robust surveillance monitoring and evaluation systems enabling better risk-stratification approaches and timely alert and response activities. Some of her work included: setting up and implementing cross border surveillance activities targeting mobile and migrant populations; designing and implementing large scale malaria indicator surveys and; testing innovative M&E tools such as respondent driven sampling, easy access groups - health facility surveys, rolling malaria indicator surveys, etc. 

In addition to Doctor Roca-Feltrer’s strong academic background that set the foundation for implementing operational research and clinical trials, she has actively supported M&E and impact evaluation components of large programmes such as seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) and perennial malaria chemoprevention (PMC) across a variety of African countries.  As part of her current position as Regional Malaria Director at PATH, she contributes to supporting global strategic policies, approaches and priorities for Surveillance as well as M&E strategies within the malaria control to elimination spectrum to the regions and country offices. She has previously supported relevant global working groups as co-chair of the former WHO SME TEG and as co-chair of the RBM MERG.  She is very committed to contribute to improvements of routine data quality and increase the use of data for strategic and operational decision-making in malaria endemic countries and is currently based in Mozambique since 2018 where she leads surveillance strengthening initiatives in the region.