Sostina Matina is a public health researcher whose work examines the intersections of migration, gender, ageing, and health equity in Southern Africa. She is based at the African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS), University of the Witwatersrand, where she coordinates and teaches the postgraduate module on Migration and Health, contributing to curriculum development and postgraduate supervision.
Her research draws on social epidemiology, health systems, and community-based enquiry to investigate how structural and policy environments shape healthcare access for marginalised and mobile populations. She is a contributor to the GEMMS Global Health Research Group, which explores gendered violence, mental health, and the politics of deservingness among migrants across multiple country contexts.
Sostina’s doctoral research, conducted as part of the Soweto Syndemics Study, explored the impact of childhood adversity, socioeconomic stress, co-morbidity, and gendered health inequalities on the timing and severity of menopause among midlife women in Soweto. This mixed-methods study offers critical insights into the life-course and psychosocial determinants of women’s health in low-resource urban settings.
Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the MRC/Wits-Agincourt Research Unit, contributing to the NIH-funded Kaya study on informal caregiving for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias in rural Mpumalanga. Her work integrated epidemiological, social network, and qualitative data to understand how extended households and care networks navigate ageing, multimorbidity, and wellbeing in resource-constrained environments.
Sostina has lectured at Nelson Mandela University and the South African College of Applied Psychology, teaching urban anthropology, research methods, and Gender, Sexuality and HIV Counselling. These roles reflect her commitment to interdisciplinary and applied learning that bridges research, community practice, and health policy. She brings expertise in mixed-methods research design, health data governance, and data management and analysis using platforms such as REDCap, ODK, KOBO, R, Stata, Statistica, NVIVO, MAXQDA, Atlas.ti, and QDA Miner.
Her long-term research agenda focuses on the social and gendered determinants of health, particularly reproductive and mental health among women in migrant and borderland communities. She advocates for feminist, participatory, and equity-focused approaches to health research, linking community engagement with robust empirical evidence to inform health systems and policy across the Global South.