Dr Mary Chambers is the Head of Public & Community Engagement at the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit Vietnam, which is part of the Wellcome Africa Asia Programme. Mary has been in Vietnam for over 20 years – initially as a medical entomologist, working on malaria and dengue transmission. Over the past decade, she has developed the public engagement programme for OUCRU Ho Chi Minh City, and daughter units in Hanoi, Nepal and Indonesia. The PE team has over 20 members who work on a diverse range of engagement projects with a range of communities including schoolchildren, farmers or patients in clinical research trials. They also have a strong emphasis on strengthening capacity of researchers and health-care workers to engage with their communities. Mary’s personal interests lie in using participatory art and film to amplify community voices and bring them into conversations about biomedical research.