Tara is a social scientist whose work has largely been under the umbrella of "implementation science", where she has used and studied quality improvement and other participatory research approaches as well as complex health systems strengthening interventions through process evaluation, theory of change-based evaluation, and realist evaluation most predominantly. Most of these studies have focused on improving community health, sexual and reproductive health, and patient-centredness. She has current research activities in Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Uganda, and Zambia and has previously also worked in Chad, Niger, Siera Leone, Bangladesh, and Nepal.
Tara leads the "Participatory Research and Community Engagement" (PACE) group at LSTM, which she started to facilitate learning across LSTM in participatory research methods and how to better integrate community engagement within research.
Tara convenes TROP716 (Quality Improvement for Health in Low-Resource Settings), which is offered through a uniquely "hybrid" platform, with synchronous learning for online and face-to-face learners. She supports further teaching in safeguarding, sexual and reproductive health, and quality improvement across other modules offered at the school. She also developed an implementation research short course to be offered from 2025. She currently supervises four PhD students who are adopting implementation research for improved quality of care. She is a senior fellow of Advance HE.
Tara is a longstanding member of the LSTM Research Ethics Committee, where she is the observational committee co-chair. She is also a member of the Quality Management Committee, the Safeguarding and Strategic Oversight Committee, and is a safeguarding focal person for the Department of International Public Health.