Alex Ernst is a Senior Program Manager and Technical Advisor based in San Francisco at UCSF within the Institute for Global Health Sciences. As a Technical Advisor, she provides programmatic management and oversight on technical assistance activities including monitoring and evaluation (M&E), HIV surveillance systems, trainings of trainers (TOTs) and step-down trainings, continuous quality improvement (CQI) and data quality assurance (DQA) activities, data triangulation and visualization as well as study design, protocol, and data collection tool development, analysis, and report-writing. From 2020-2021, she worked closely with the San Francisco Department of Public Health (SFDPH) to stand up, train, and provide technical leadership to the contact tracing team for COVID-19, including the development of data and workflows, SOPs and guides, trainings, QI projects, data matching and cleaning protocols, and data monitoring and visualization dashboards.

She joined the UCSF team after serving as a health sector Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) in southern Mozambique, giving her extensive experience working at a district hospital providing HTS, ART, PMTCT, VMMC, and OVC services as well as co-leading community-based AGYW empowerment and malalria prevention initiatives. Her focus was on establishing a community adherence support group program for people living with HIV/AIDS, providing mentorship on M&E, and leading trainings with facility- and community-based health workers. Domestically, she has previous experience as the Executive Director of a social enterprise nonprofit, The Nashville Mobile Market, based out of Vanderbilt University which focused on providing healthy food options and nutrition-based cooking classes to food insecure neighborhoods in Nashville, Tennessee.

She obtained her MPH from the Tulane School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine in Global Health Systems and Development with a focus in Program Design and Implementation. She is a fluent Portuguese and native English speaker.