Dr. Carolina de Vargas Nunes Coll wins 2023 Paula Kantor Award

Dr. Carolina de Vargas Nunes Coll is the winner of the 2023 Paula Kantor Award. The award was created to honor Paula Kantor, a former ICRW researcher who was killed in 2015 while working in Afghanistan. Paula was a leading expert on gender issues in international development, with nearly 20 years of experience in policy and program research related to integrating gender into agriculture and rural development. Dr. Kantor’s work was largely driven by her passion to improve lives in low- and middle-income countries, especially those of women and girls.

This year, ICRW is proud to honor Dr. Coll, who has dedicated her career to improving gender equality outcomes. Her research focuses on the intersection of violence against women and girls and health inequality in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and examines the intergenerational effects of violence against women across the life cycle, including the effects on maternal and child outcomes. Born and raised in Pelotas, southern Brazil, Dr. Coll is an epidemiologist who completed her PhD in Epidemiology and Master’s in Science at the Federal University of Pelotas in Brazil. 

She is currently a research fellow with Wellcome Trust, the International Center for Equity in Health and the Human Development and Violence Research Centre at the Federal University of Pelotas in Brazil. She completed a doctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford (UK) in the Psychiatry Department and established women’s mental health collaboratives. She is also a member of the scientific advisory board for the Lancet Commission on Gender-based Violence and Maltreatment of Young People and the Child Protection Research group at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Her research has been published in renowned journals including BMJ Global Health, Journal of Global Health, Lancet Global Health, Nature Medicine, Preventive Medicine, E Clinical Medicine, and The Lancet Regional Health of Americas.