Maria Jose Pastor is a public health professional with over seven years of experience working with public and private sector organizations to co-design sustainable solutions that drive lasting improvements in health outcomes.
As a Program Officer at Results for Development (R4D), Ms. Pastor provides technical and program management support across R4D’s Health practice. She leads key technical and project management activities, including the Financing Accelerator Network for NCDs (FAN), where she works with local partners to enhance access to high-quality, people-centered NCD services. Her work focuses on strengthening health financing functions—resource mobilization, pooling, and purchasing—while also considering service delivery and governance aspects.
Ms. Pastor leads technical work for the USAID-funded Local Health System Sustainability (LHSS) Project Case Competition, overseeing the design and execution of the competition. She collaborates with partners to identify and highlight impactful health system strengthening (HSS) initiatives, ensuring that real-world examples are used to analyze what works—and what doesn’t—when implementing, institutionalizing, and scaling up HSS approaches.
Her expertise spans qualitative and quantitative research and analysis, maternal, newborn, and child health (MNCH), health financing, nutrition financing, collaborative learning, and health systems strengthening.
Prior to joining R4D, Ms. Pastor was a Program Associate at International Business & Technical Consultants, Inc. (IBTCI), where she supported post-Ebola recovery efforts to help countries rebuild economic and social systems. She also contributed to a project with the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), identifying priority behaviors and solution pathways for interventions in energy, education, and WASH. Before IBTCI, she conducted research on commercial complementary foods in food-insecure regions of Latin America for her master’s thesis.
Ms. Pastor holds a Master’s in Global Health from ISGlobal-University of Barcelona and a BS in Kinesiology with a concentration in Public Health and a minor in Anthropology from The College of William & Mary. She is a native speaker of English and Spanish and speaks conversational French and Italian.
