Chemtai Mungo, MD, MPH, has been appointed as a UNC WRHR Scholar. Her primary research is focused on increasing access to cervical cancer prevention in low-income countries.
The UNC Women’s Reproductive Health Research (WRHR) Career Development Program is excited to announce that Chemtai Mungo, MD, MPH, has been appointed as a WRHR Scholar effective September 13, 2021.
Dr. Mungo is an obstetrician/gynecologist and clinical researcher who was born and raised in Kenya. She received a bachelor’s degree with Honors from the University of California, Berkeley and completed medical school at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), where she was a Doris Duke International Clinical Research Fellow and spent a year in Western Kenya working on cervical cancer prevention. She also completed a master’s in public health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology in San Francisco.
She is passionate about using research, advocacy, and capacity-building to pursue global women’s health equity. Her primary research is focused on increasing access to effective, evidence-based cervical cancer prevention in low-income countries, including investigating resource-appropriate and effective methods of treating cervical precancer, especially among women living with HIV in low-resource settings.
Dr. Mungo was named a 2020 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Conquer Cancer Young Investigator and awarded the National Cancer Institute AIDS Malignancy Fellowship in 2021. At UNC, she will join a multidisciplinary team working to reduce the burden of cervical cancer in Malawi and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Her research will be supported in part by the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, the UNC Center for AIDS Research, the UNC School of Medicine, and the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
In 2020, UNC was one of 15 universities selected to participate in the nationwide WRHR program, funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). The primary goal of the parent program is to provide junior faculty with state-of-the-art training in women’s reproductive health research in an academic setting and further develop the pipeline of independently funded Ob/Gyn clinician-scientists. Scholars receive 75% protected time to carry out their proposed work, along with seeding funding for research and professional development. Learn more about the UNC WRHR Program.