Prof. Hans Koot

Hans M. Koot, PhD, is Professor of Developmental Psychology and Developmental Psychopathology at the Department of Clinical, Neuro- and Developmental Psychology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His research interests regard emotional and behavioural development of children and adolescents, developmental psychopathology, prevention in mental health care, quality of life, chronic paediatric conditions, learning disabilities and autism. After his psychology studies in 1983 he became a junior researcher at Radboud University Nijmegen, while from 1988 to 2002 he worked as a senior researcher, associate professor and professor at the Erasmus MC Rotterdam Child and Adolescent Psychiatry department. From 2002 he works at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam where he was Chair of the Department of Developmental Psychology, director of the Amsterdam Public Health Mental Health program, and dean of the Faculty of Behavioural and Movement Sciences. Since 2016 he is a visiting fellow at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Department of Clinical-, Neuro- and Developmental Psychology. Koot published about 350 papers in peer reviewed national and international journals, and about 80 books and book chapters, and was advisor of 45 PhD students.

Prof. Amina Abubakar

Email : AAbubakar@kemri-wellcome.org

Amina is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Public Health at Pwani University, Kenya and a Research Fellow at the Kenya Medical Research Institute/Wellcome Trust Research Programme. She co-leads the Neuroscience research group at KEMRI-WTRP. She is also an honorary fellow at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, UK. She holds the prestigious MRC/DfiD African Research Leaders award. In 2016, she was awarded the Royal Society Pfizer Award. Her main interests are in the study of developmental delays and impairments among children exposed to various health problems such as HIV, malnutrition and malaria. A focus in her work is the development of culturally appropriate strategies for identifying, monitoring and rehabilitating at-risk children. Prof Abubakar has been instrumental in developing various culturally appropriate measures of child development that have been used in many African countries. In addition, she is also interested in examining the prevalence of and risk factors for neurodevelopmental disorders, specifically ASD, within the African context. Prof. Abubakar has given guest lectures, and workshops largely focusing on cross-cultural research methods in various countries, including Cameroon, Germany, Indonesia, Kenya, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, and Spain. She has (co)-authored more than 80 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. She has served on technical working groups, and forums for various international organizations including the World Health Organization, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (USA), Save the Children, and Autism Speaks. She is actively involved in capacity building for African Scientists; she has supervised Postgraduate Diploma, Masters and PhD students in Kenya. She has also supervised PhD students from South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia.

Prof. Charles Newton

Charles Newton qualified from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, with postgraduate training in Paediatrics in Manchester and London, United Kingdom. As a lecturer at University of Oxford, he went to Kilifi Kenya in 1989, to help set up a unit to study severe malaria in African children. Thereafter he spent 2 years as a Post-doctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins, USA; studying mechanisms of brain damage in central nervous system infections. He completed his training in Paediatric Neurology at Great Ormond Street Hospital, UK. In 1998 he was awarded a Wellcome Trust Senior Clinical Fellowship at University College London, to return to Kilifi, to study CNS infections in children. He conducts research on CNS infections in children; epidemiological studies of epilepsy and neurological impairment; tetanus, jaundice and sepsis in neonates. He is particularly interested in behavioural comorbidity of neurological conditions in children.  In 2011 he took up a professorship in Psychiatry at the University of Oxford to conduct studies of Neurodevelopmental Disorders and Epilepsy in Africa and Autism in the United Kingdom and Lithuania

Prof. Gilbert Kokwaro

Dr. Martha Mwangome

Affiliation(s)

KEMRI – Wellcome Trust, Kenya 

Martha is currently working at KEMRI/Wellcome Trust Research Programme in a Post-Doctoral research position in the Nutrition assessment and Intervention research group led by Dr. James Berkley. She has a Master’s degree in Global Health Sciences from University of Oxford, UK and a PhD degree in nutrition epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), UK. Her thesis focused on anthropometric assessment of infants under 6 months, evaluating the potential of using the mid-upper arm circumferences (MUAC) in diagnosing acute malnutrition within this age group. Altogether she has 10 years working experience in public health nutrition research in Africa. Her work has largely focused on studying undernutrition in African children aged below 6 months old and has employed both qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection and analysis. Her interests are in identifying and testing novel and cost-effective approaches to assessment, prevention and treatment of acute malnutrition in infants and young children in Africa. Emerging interests in nutrition in emergency settings and the double burden of malnutrition among the urban poor.

Dr. Patricia Kitsao-Wekulo

Affiliation(s):

African Population & Health Research Centre, Kenya

Patricia obtained a PhD in Psychology from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, and Master’s (M.Ed. – Home Economics) and Bachelor’s Degrees (B.Ed. – Home Economics) from Kenyatta University, Kenya.  While engaged as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Aga Khan University’s Institute for Human Development (AKU/IHD), she was the Lead Research Consultant on a project which sought to provide for a living model of best practice in Early Childhood Development (ECD) centres, develop understanding of factors that contribute to resilience in children growing up in adversity, and provide the framework for a longitudinal study of the influences of ECD programmes on human capital formation.

As a child development researcher, Patricia is interested in the investigation of the relationship between antecedent context characteristics and child developmental outcomes.  This mainly concerns the influence of factors such as the child’s immediate environment on cognition, motor development, language and psychosocial behavior.  Such research has important implications for the development of sustainable and efficacious interventions.

Dr. Melissa Gladstone

Affiliation(s):

University of Liverpool, UK

My focus is in creating tools to assess children with developmental disorders and disabilities as well as in improving low cost interventions and outcomes for children with neurodevelopmental disorders in low income settings. I am driven to change the focus in international child health from child survival to child thrival and child and family well being for all children and families. My research aims to understand what interventions can make a difference to children with neurodevelopmental disorders and how we can measure these changes effectively using culturally appropriate and relevant measures in low income settings.