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Dr. Charles Katulamu’s research career began with a question about who gets maternal health care. As an undergraduate in Uganda, he wrote a thesis examining differences in maternal and prenatal care utilization between cohabiting and married women. 

Broader questions about pregnancy, childbirth, and women’s reproductive health eventually brought him to the University of Michigan’s sociology PhD program. The Population Studies Center, he said, was one of the main reasons he chose Michigan: he kept asking himself whether he was “a pure sociologist or a demographer of sorts,” and PSC offered a home for both, shaping him into the global health scholar he is today.

During his graduate traineeship at PSC, his focus advanced toward abortion care. He designed a study investigating how women and healthcare workers navigate the realities of criminalization, restrictions, and stigma around abortion to access and provide safe abortion care, work that became the dissertation he defended this June under co-chairs Maggie Frye and Sarah Burgard.

A remarkable feature of Dr. Katulamu’s research is the scale and magnitude of his fieldwork. Working through relationships with public health facilities in Kampala and NGOs focused on maternal health care, Dr. Katulamu and his research team fielded 1,608 surveys with women and adolescent girls about their reproductive health experiences. He built trust in in-depth interviews with 50 women who self-reported terminating pregnancies, then interviewed 55 healthcare workers — many of whom spoke openly about providing abortion care despite legal prohibition, framing it as a moral duty to protect women’s well-being.

Retaining his affiliation with PSC, Dr. Katulamu is now an Impact Scholar postdoctoral fellow at Michigan Medicine’s Center for Global Health Equity. 

At September’s PSC Coffee Chat, Dr. Katulamu described his current project working with adolescent girls and young women to design simple mobile applications that build pathways to consistent use of HIV prevention technologies — especially Lenacapavir, the long-acting injectable drug taken every six months.

His abortion research taught him that adherence is rarely just about cost. Women described forgetting to return for a contraceptive implant or injection and becoming pregnant as a result. The app intervention builds in reminders through calls and calendar prompts. His work will also investigate how Lenacapavir impacts uptake for other prevention methods such as condom use, self-testing for HIV, vaginal rings, and oral PEP and PrEP, 

Dr. Katulamu will return to Uganda this winter for continued fieldwork and for conversations with bodies like the Uganda AIDS Commission about what comes next in an era of declining foreign aid and funding for global health crises. 

The new injectable has met remarkably little hesitancy, even in communities that fiercely resisted COVID-19 and malaria vaccines, Dr. Katulamu observed — with some regions reporting shortages from overwhelming demand. Why? He suspects the answer lies in decades of lived experience with HIV and in shifting stigma around the disease, but he plans to find out during his research. 

Dr. Charles Katulamu is an Impact Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow with the University of Michigan Center for Global Health Equity. He completed his Sociology doctorate in June as a graduate trainee of the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research.

This post was written by Tevah Platt, communications manager for the Population Studies Center.