Erin holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from Queen’s University and a Masters of Health, Community and Development from the London School of Economics and Political Science. In 2013, she completed her PhD in Public Health from the University of Cape Town (UCT), which used sexual history narratives to assess how hegemonic masculinities implicate on men and women’s vulnerabilities to and responses to gender based violence (GBV) and HIV/AIDS.
She is currently an honorary research associate at the School of Public Health in the Division of Social and Behavioural Sciences at UCT where she contributes to various gender and health related research, teaches qualitative research methods and gender and health, and supervises Masters of Public Health students. She has extensively published on sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), prevention of GBV, HIV stigma and resilience, gender transformative evaluation, masculinities, participatory research and acts as a peer reviewer for numerous academic journals. For a study she coordinated for the advocacy NGO AIDS-Free World that sought to identify contextual barriers to reporting GBV, she was awarded as a Star in Global Health by Grand Challenges Canada. She has also used research to inform and evaluate HIV/AIDS related projects for the NGOs Transcape and Center for AIDS Research Development and Evaluation (CADRE). Erin also acts as a rape crisis counsellor and court supporter at Rape Crisis Cape Town.