For more than two decades, I have worked to identify relevant interventions and adapt these interventions to local contexts. This work started when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Eastern Province, Zambia, and was working as a Water Sanitation and Hygiene Education (WASHE) volunteer, carrying out community engaged research to identify community needs and strengths. This community-engaged work led to sustainable solutions, rather than quick fixes that divided communities or broke easily. I continued to focus my work in the area of pre-implementation, where I’d argue that much more implementation science research needs to focus. I have carried out a range of implementation science research, however, across the stages of implementation from adaptation to evaluation and scale up. One of my main aims is to bring children’s experiences and responses to interventions more fully into implementation science research. Another aim I have is to increase the use of ethnographic, narrative, and arts-based methods and theories in implementation science, which hold powerful implications for improving the appropriateness and sustainability of interventions and for understanding why and how interventions work.

I am the co-lead in the innovation incubator in Washington University’s National Cancer Institute-funded Implementation Science Center (ISC-3).

Select funded projects

Select peer reviewed articles

Hunleth, J, Spray, J, Ruiz, S., Maki, J., Fedele, D. A., Prabhakaran, S., . . .Waters, E. Situating household management of children’s asthma in the context of social, economic, and environmental injustice. Journal of Asthma. 2020

Herrick, CJ, Humble, S, Hollar, L, Chang, SH, Hunleth, J, McQueen, A, & James, AS. Cost-related medication non-adherence, cost coping behaviors, and cost conversations among individuals with and without diabetes. J Gen Intern Med. 2020: doi:10.1007/s11606-020-06176-4

Hunleth, J, Lee, A, Maki, J, James, A, Lobb, R. Rural Primary Care and the Diagnostic Resolution of Abnormal Screening Mammograms: A Mixed Methods Study in Rural Missouri. Journal of Health Disparities Research and Practice. 2020;

Njelesani, J, Hunleth, J. Youth participatory research evidence to inform health policy: a systematic review protocol. BMJ Open. 2020;10(8), e036522. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2019-036522

Muthukrishnan M, Sutcliffe S, Hunleth JM, Wang JS, Colditz GA, James AS. Conducting a randomized trial in rural and urban safety-net health centers: Added value of community-based participatory research. Contemp Clin Trials Commun. 2018;10:29-35. PMCID:PMC5898527 PMID:29696155

Hunleth J. Children as Caregivers: The Global Fight against Tuberculosis and HIV in Zambia. Newark, Rutgers University Press 2017.

Hunleth J. Children’s roles in tuberculosis treatment regimes: constructing childhood and kinship in urban Zambia. Med Anthropol Q. 2013;27(2):292-311. PMCID:PMC3707965 PMID:23804398 (Awarded the 2014 Steven Polgar award from the Society for Medical Anthropology for its originality, theoretical importance, and methodology)

Ager A, Zimmerman C, Unlu K, Rinehart R, Nyberg B, Zeanah C, Hunleth J, Bastiaens I, Weldy A, Bachman G, Blum AB, Strottman K. What strategies are appropriate for monitoring children outside of family care and evaluating the impact of the programs intended to serve them? Child Abuse Negl. 2012;36(10):732-42. PMID:23083900 Bond V, Chilikwela L, Simwinga M, Reade Z, Ayles H, Godfrey-Faussett P, Hunleth J. Children’s role in enhanced case finding in Zambia IJTLD. 2010;14(10):1280-1287.