Maria Jose Pastor is a public health professional with over nine 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 and Evaluation and Adaptive Learning (EAL) practices. She leads key technical and project management activities, including for the Financing Accelerator Network for NCDs (FAN), where she collaborates with local partners to enhance access to high-quality, people-centered noncommunicable disease (NCD) services. She also supports the Federal-Level Technical Assistance for Primary Health Care (PHC) Financing project, where she contributes to monitoring, learning and evaluation efforts to consolidate gains and results to support federal agencies to institutionalize and strengthen established systems, processes and tools for implementing PHC reform. Her work focuses on strengthening core health financing functions such as resource mobilization, pooling, and purchasing, while also integrating service delivery and governance dimensions. 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 degree in global health from ISGlobal–University of Barcelona and a bachelor of science 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.
Publications
- Building Pathways to Sustainable Financing for NCDs in Sub-Saharan Africa | Financing Accelerator Network for NCDs
- The Power of Collaborative Learning to Advance NCD Financing | Financing Accelerator Network for NCDs
- Transforming NCD Financing: How System-Level Approaches Can Drive Change in Countries | Financing Accelerator Network for NCDs
- Evaluation: Second Performance Evaluation (PE2) of USAID Ebola Pillar II Activities
