Leigh Senderowicz is a mixed-methods researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Health Disparities Research program.  In 2019, she earned her doctorate from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in the department of Global Health and Population.  With Harvard’s Women and Health Initiative, Leigh is currently leading a multi-site study on contraceptive autonomy and rights-based family planning measurement in West Africa.

Leigh graduated with honors from Wesleyan University, where she studied anthropology and feminist, gender & sexuality studies.  After college, Leigh was named a Watson Fellow, and conducted a year-long study of abortion access under the Global Gag Rule in Peru, South Africa, Senegal and Turkey.  Leigh then worked as case manager at a Latino social service organization in her home town of Philadelphia, working in a pilot program to better serve TANF clients involved in multiple systems.  Leigh went on her earn her masters of public health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she was awarded a Sommer Scholarship and inducted into the Delta Omega honor society.  Following her masters program, Leigh moved to Burkina Faso, where she worked as an assistant researcher at the Institut Supérieur des Sciences de la Population (ISSP) in the University of Ouagadougou I.

All throughout all of this, Leigh has been devoted to the causes of reproductive rights and justice, focusing the majority of her work on rights-based family planning and access to comprehensive abortion care.  Leigh's work takes a critical approach to the study of reproductive health, integrating explicit analyses of class, race, gender and history into her examination of the ways that women living the Global South are targeted by global health programs.  Leigh has managed a research portfolio than spans from Mexico to Tanzania to the United States, but her particular geographic area of interest is francophone West Africa.  Leigh’s work seeks to integrate critical theory into her public health research, using a range of methodologies from grounded theory to econometrics.

At Harvard, Leigh was affiliated with the Women and Health Initiative, the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, and the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies department. 

At UW-Madison, Leigh is an affiliate of the UW Collaborative for Reproductive Equity, the Center for Demography and Ecology, and the Center for Research on Gender and Women.

Leigh is fluent in French and Spanish.  Leigh is a fiercely proud native Philadelphian who enjoys gardening (amateur), baking (intermediate) and travel (professional).