Sostina Matina is a public health researcher whose work investigates the intersections of migration, gender, ageing, and health equity in Southern Africa. She is a researcher at the African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS) at the University of the Witwatersrand. Additionally, she coordinates and teaches the postgraduate module on Migration and Health, contributing to curriculum design and postgraduate supervision.
Before joining ACMS, Sostina lectured at Nelson Mandela University (NMU) and the South African College of Applied Psychology (SACAP), teaching urban anthropology, research methods, and Gender, Sexuality and HIV Counselling. These experiences strengthened her commitment to interdisciplinary and applied learning that links research, community practice, and health policy.
Her research is at the intersection of social epidemiology, health systems, and community-based enquiry, focusing on how structural and policy environments influence access to healthcare for marginalised, mobile, and diverse populations. She contributes to multi-country work through the GEMMS Global Health Research Group, exploring gendered violence, mental health, and the politics of deservingness among migrants.
Sostina’s doctoral research, part of the Soweto Syndemics Study, examined how childhood adversity, socioeconomic stress, co-morbidity, and gendered health inequalities affect the timing of menopause and symptom severity among midlife women in Soweto. This work, which combines quantitative and qualitative analyses, offers vital insights into the life-course and psychosocial determinants of women’s health in low-resource urban settings.
Previously, Sostina was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the MRC/Wits-Agincourt Research Unit, working on the NIH-funded Kaya study on informal caregiving for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias in rural Mpumalanga. Her analyses integrated epidemiological, social network, and qualitative data to explore how extended households and care networks manage ageing, multimorbidity, and wellbeing in resource-constrained settings.
Her recent publications focus on menopause and women’s health, caregiving and social networks, as well as the vulnerability and emotional labour of undocumented Zimbabwean migrants in South Africa. She brings expertise in data management, analysis, and visualisation (REDCap, ODK, KOBO, R, Stata, Statistica, NVIVO, MAXQDA, Atlas.ti, and QDA Miner), mixed-methods research design, and health data governance.
Sostina ‘s long-term research agenda concentrates on the social and gendered factors influencing health, especially the reproductive and mental health of women in migrant and borderland communities. Her work promotes feminist, participatory, and equity-focused approaches to health research, connecting community engagement with strong empirical evidence to shape health systems and policies across the Global South