Prof. Imelda Bates

Affiliation(s):

Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, UK

Research

Imelda’s current research activities focus on anaemia and blood transfusion systems in LMICs particularly on evidence to improve the supply and use of blood for transfusion. She has also established an expanding and vibrant Capacity Research Unit which is at the forefront of research into how to design, measure and evaluate programmes to strengthen research capacity and laboratory systems in LMICs.

Teaching

Imelda is a member of LSTM’s Learning and Teaching Committee. She is Course Director for the innovative and highly successful Diploma in Project Design and Management which was established in Ghana in 2003 to increase multi-disciplinary institutional research capacity. She also teaches on many of LSTM’s on-site courses including Diploma and Masters programmes and the Consultancy course. She has supervised many successful PhD and Masters students.

Prof. Kathryn Maitland, FMedSc

Professor of Paediatric Tropical Infectious Diseases at the Faculty of Medicine and Director of the ICCARE Centre at the Global Centre of Health Innovation, Imperial College, London and an Honorary Fellow at MRC Clinical Trials Unit, University College, London. Over the last 17 years she has been based full-time at the East Africa, where she leads a research group whose major research portfolio includes severe malaria, bacterial sepsis and severe malnutrition in children and clinical trials in emergency care. Her team conducted the largest trial in critically children ever undertaken in Africa (FEAST trial) examining fluid resuscitation strategies in children with severe febrile illness, showing that fluid boluses increased mortality compared to no-bolus (control) (Maitland et al, NEJM 2011). Her team is currently running two other large clinical trials investigating transfusion and other treatment strategies in 3950 African children with severe life-threatening anaemia (TRACT; Mpoya et al Trials 2016) and the optimum oxygen saturation threshold for which oxygen should be targeted and how best to administer oxygen in 4800 children (COAST: Children Oxygenation Administration Strategies Trial).

Prof. Tom Williams

Affiliations:

KEMRI – Wellcome Trust, Kenya

Imperial College London, UK 

Tom is Professor of Haemoglobinopathy Research at Imperial College, London. Tom has worked in Kilifi since May 2000, where he now directs a programme of human genetic research with a focus on polymorphisms of the red blood cell. He obtained his medical degree at Westminster Medical School in the University of London in 1985 and subsequently trained in Paediatrics and Tropical Medicine at a range of London hospitals including Westminster Children’s Hospital, University College, the Hospital for Tropical Diseases and Imperial College. He obtained his PhD on the genetics of malaria resistance in children, from the University of London in 1999. He has published extensively on the burden and clinical consequences of red cell genetic disorders and their relationship with malaria protection, questions which he studies using both laboratory-based and epidemiological approaches.