Mimi Jenkins
- UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA DAVIS
- WATERSHED
Mimi Jenkins, Ph.D., is a Professional Research Engineer at the University of California at Davis and holds a joint appointment with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She has over 18 years of combined research, professional, and consulting experience in rural water supply, sanitation, and public health engineering in developing countries, including Chad, Congo, Madagascar, Ghana, Benin, Tanzania, Malawi, Kenya and Bangladesh. In 1991, Mimi acquired her MS in water resources and environmental engineering from the University of California, Davis, following four years as a public health engineer responsible for rural water supply and sanitation development in the Congo and Chad. Before returning for her PhD which she received from UC Davis in 1999, she gained experience in epidemiological surveillance, health and hygiene promotion, operational research, and community water supply development while working for Unicef in Benin as the Water and Environmental Sanitation Project Officer responsible for the National Guinea Worm Eradication Programme. Under the guidance of Sandy Cairncross and faculty at UC Davis, she conducted her PhD research in 1995-1996 in Benin on understanding and modeling household sanitation choices and the determinants of changes in sanitation behaviour with a goal to assess the drivers of new demand for sanitation and the potential of a marketing approach to sanitation promotion. This work proved fundamental in shaping the direction and momentum for current work at the Hygiene Centre in sanitation marketing and promotion in developing countries. Her research work at UC Davis involves the development and application of systems analysis and operations research methods, and economic-engineering modeling tools, to integrated water resources planning, management and policy problems in California and Kenya.