From volunteer to public health specialist: Sera Ngeh’s Pacific journey
When Sera Ngeh first set foot in Tonga as an Australian Youth Ambassador for Development in 2009, she had no idea the Pacific would become a defining part of her career.
Nearly two decades later, Sera now works as an international public health professional across the Pacific region, supporting countries to prepare for and respond to disease outbreaks and public health emergencies.
Looking back, she sees a career shaped by following the work she found most meaningful.
Finding a passion in Pacific public health
Sera studied pharmacy as an undergraduate but soon realised that a traditional pharmacy career was not for her. Instead, her assignment in Tonga at the Central Pharmacy and Medical Store gave Sera her first experience working in public health.
That professional experience overseas gave Sera a deeper understanding of the communities she wanted to work with.
“Working in Tonga really opened my eyes to different career pathways and opportunities,” Sera says. “I realised I was passionate about working in public health in an international development setting.”
So after returning to Australia, she undertook a Master of Public Health at Monash University while working part-time at the Burnet Institute, strengthening medical supply systems in Papua New Guinea.
In 2015, she joined the Tropical Cyclone Pam response with the World Health Organization (WHO) in Vanuatu. What was initially expected to be a two-month deployment turned into five years in Vanuatu. After two and a half years with WHO, Sera continued her work in Vanuatu with another organisation on improving and digitalising immunisation and medical supply chains and strengthening the health system.
By then, Sera had years of practical public health experience, but the work increasingly required her to interpret data and use it to guide decisions.
“I had worked in public health for a bit, but I felt drawn to epidemiology,” she says.
Wanting a stronger grounding in epidemiology brought her to Canberra and the Master of Philosophy in Applied Epidemiology (MAE) program at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health (NCEPH).
Learning epidemiology in a pandemic
Sera joined the 2020 MAE cohort for three weeks of face-to-face training before undertaking a placement with the Department of Health in Western Australia, as COVID-19 started to transform public health practice around the world.
The cohort turned out to be an important source of support.
“We kept in contact with most of the other cohort members throughout our MAE,” says Sera, as she shared how she learned from a second-year scholar during her placement and later passed that guidance on to another first-year student.
In Western Australia, Sera was placed in the Communicable Disease Control Directorate, where she worked on communicable disease and epidemiology projects while learning, in real time, how public health systems responded to a rapidly evolving pandemic.
Among the many lessons, she saw first-hand how important risk communication was to an effective public health response, and how data and evidence can support risk communication.
“The MAE program really gave me a much better understanding and confidence to be able to look at data, analyse it, and use it for decision-making,” she says.
Putting skills into practice
In 2026, Sera returned to Vanuatu through the partnership between WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) and NCEPH.
Backed by the epidemiological skills she wanted when she entered MAE, she was deployed as a risk communication and community engagement (RCCE) specialist to help Vanuatu prepare for a threat before an outbreak occurred.
“It was for measles preparedness because of the outbreaks of measles in Australia and New Zealand,” Sera explains. “So it wasn't an outbreak response; it was more about preparing to prevent a potential outbreak.”
While WHO announced in 2025 that Vanuatu has eliminated measles, continued action is required in the country due to the lower vaccination coverage rates, the movement of people and the current capacity of its health system.
Working with the Health Promotion Unit at the Vanuatu Ministry of Health, Sera supported the development of RCCE materials, strengthened operational planning and coordination and strategic engagement with stakeholders for a national measles immunisation campaign.
“In the case of measles, we want the community to know what measles is, why they need their children to get vaccinated, when the campaign will happen, and what they need to do.”
In addition to SMS, radio, newspaper, TV, and social media posts, she also worked with local government authorities, NGOs and Chief Networks to communicate the importance of measles prevention and vaccination.
“As a lot of the communities are still living in rural areas, working through existing community mechanisms ensures that the message gets passed along,” she says. “It is also important to have two-way communication channels and to obtain community insights to better understand the situation and to tailor our RCCE approaches.”
The key goal of the campaign is to increase measles vaccination coverage among children under five from about 61 per cent to 95 per cent to achieve herd immunity.
With limited resources, a stretched workforce and competing priorities, Sera and her colleagues had to find ways to fit the work around existing commitments and focus their efforts where they were most needed.
For Sera, effective preparedness also depends on building trust before an outbreak occurs.
Relationships and understanding matter
As Sera’s GOARN deployment ended in July, she remained in the country as a consultant supporting the Ministry of Health with RCCE systems strengthening, measles and other areas of work.
It is not the first time a short deployment has kept Sera in a Pacific country longer than expected—and may not be the last time.
If there is one lesson she has taken from years of working across the Pacific region, Sera says it’s that technical expertise is only part of what makes public health work effective:
I think that really comes down to building good relationships, finding ways you can provide assistance where it's needed and taking the time to understand and respect the culture you’re working in.”