Dr Inka Barnett is a Research Fellow and Co-Lead of the Health & Nutrition Cluster, affiliated with the Centre for Development Impact (CDI) and the Food Equity Centre. With over 20 years’ experience, she leads interdisciplinary evaluation and implementation research at the interface of nutrition, behavioural epidemiology and policy.
Her work investigates how change occurs in complex, politically shaped systems, showing how structural inequality, gendered power relations, and digital and spatial exclusion shape food systems and nutritional outcomes, particularly for children and adolescents. She treats evaluation and implementation research as engines for learning and transformation—linking evidence to decision-making through systems thinking, adaptive approaches and equity.
Methodologically, Dr Barnett specialises in theory-based, complexity-aware evaluation, including realist evaluation, contribution analysis, outcome mapping and other mixed-methods designs. She combines causal inference with qualitative insight, often integrating longitudinal analysis with lived-experience data to understand what works, for whom, in which contexts and why. Her approach emphasises co-production, localisation and epistemic justice.
She has designed and led many large-scale evaluation and implementation research studies for UNICEF, NIHR, WFP, FCDO, GAIN and Plan International across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. She builds interdisciplinary teams and collaborates with government and civil-society partners to strengthen monitoring, accountability and learning systems. Lately, her portfolio has focused on nutrition-sensitive, shock-responsive social protection, strengthening food-system resilience to climate stress, and accelerating the use of evidence in rapidly evolving policy spaces.
External Roles
- Grant Reviewer for NIHR and UKRI
- Advisory Board Member, NIHR Global Health Research Group on Community Food for Human Nutrition and Planetary Health in Small Islands (GCFaH).
- External Mentor, Development Research Initiative (dRi), Bangladesh
- Honorary Research Associate, Oxford Department of International Development (ODID), University of Oxford
Teaching
Inka is a specialist in evaluation and mixed-methods research. She convenes and lectures on IDS’s Evaluation Methodologies MA module (previously co-convening the MA Poverty & Development), contributes to the Nutrition and Health & Development MA modules, and has experiences in designing and delivering professional short courses for diverse practitioner and student cohorts—including the Transform Nutrition Summer School. Her teaching bridges rigorous quantitative and qualitative methods with real-world application in policy and programme settings.
PhD Supervision
Inka currently supervises the following PhD students:
- Mezhgan Temory — ‘Investigating Afghan Youth Citizenship Experiences in the Diaspora: France and the United Kingdom’.
- Yajing Hu — ‘Navigating Health in a Digital Age: How do online engagements (re)shape the health-seeking behaviour of Chinese migrants in the UK?’
- Lusyomo Namakau Simatele — ‘#WhenIAmNext? The Role of Social Media Activism in Anti-GBV Action in South Africa’.
Inka welcomes PhD applications on the following topics:
- Nutrition, food systems and social protection
- Methods for complexity
