Our Team

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Professor Edwine Barasa is the Interim Executive Director of the KEMRI Wellcome Trust Research Programme, where he also heads the Programme’s Health Economics Research Unit (HERU). He is a Professor of Health Economics at the University of Oxford. Edwine’s research interests include health financing; equity and efficiency analysis in healthcare; economic evaluation of healthcare interventions; measuring health systems' performance; and health system governance. Edwine has several years of experience of practice, advisory, and conducting health economics and financing research in Kenya and in the broader Sub-Saharan African region. He provides health financing advisory to the Kenya Ministry of Health with his latest roles including appointments by the Minister of Health to the taskforce for the reform of the National Hospital Insurance Fund and Kenya Health Benefits Advisory Panel. He advises the World Bank and the World Health Organization on health financing in low-income countries. He is a member of the advisory board of the Africa CDC’s Health Economics Unit and a member of the Africa Universal Health Coverage Commission. Edwine has a PhD in health economics from the University of Cape Town.

Marcia Castro is Andelot Professor of Demography, chair of the Department of Global Health and Population, director of the Brazil Studies Program of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) at Harvard University, associate faculty of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, and faculty member of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. Her research focuses on the development and use of multidisciplinary approaches to identify the determinants of infectious disease transmission in different ecological settings to inform control policies. Marcia served as co-chair of the WHO’s Technical Consultation on The Burden of and Response to Malaria in Urban Areas in 2021 and as an advisor of the Evidence Review Group on border malaria in 2017. She serves on several advisory boards in Brazil, including the Institute for the Studies of Health Policies (IEPS), the Science Center for Early Childhood (NCPI), Instituto Todos Pela Saúde (ITpS), and Instituto Cactus. She is a columnist for Folha de São Paulo and an elected member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Dr Ngozi Erondu is the Technical Director at the Global Institute for Disease Elimination. Ngozi has fifteen years of experience in research, leadership and governance in global public health and health systems strengthening in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and North Africa regions. Through her work at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, she has conducted operational research and contributed to policy advocacy for malaria and HIV disease programmes. Ngozi has also worked in health emergency surveillance, preparedness and response working with US Centers for Disease Control, the UK Health Security Agency, and the World Health Organization. Ngozi is the co-chair of the Lancet Commission exploring the health impacts of discrimination in global public health and the Health Security co-editor for PLOS Global Public Health. She has a PhD in Epidemiology and Global Health and Development from the from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Dr Jennifer Gardy works at the Gates Foundation where she is the Deputy Director for Surveillance, Data, and Epidemiology on the Malaria team, and Deputy Director for the Institute for Disease Modeling. Before joining the foundation, Jenn spent 10 years at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control and the University of British Columbia’s School of Population and Public Health, where she held the Canada Research Chair in Public Health Genomics. Her research focused on the use of genomics as a tool to understand pathogen transmission, incorporating techniques drawn from genomics, bioinformatics, modeling, information visualization, and the social sciences. In 2021, she was elected to the National Academy of Medicine. In addition to her science work, Jennifer is a science communicator, hosting many science documentaries for Canadian television as well as authoring two science books for children. She holds a PhD in molecular biology and biochemistry from Simon Fraser University.

Dr Corine Karema is the Director of Malaria & NTDs at Quality & Equity Healthcare. She is a clinician, public health specialist and global health leader. With over two decades of experience, Corine has held various leadership roles, including Director of the National Malaria and NTDs Control Program in Rwanda for over ten years, ALMA Senior Malaria Program Officer, Special Advisor to the Global Fund Board Chair, Advocacy Strategy lead for the Global End Malaria Council, and, most recently, Interim CEO of the RBM Partnership to End Malaria. As member of technical expert groups, she has advised the WHO, RBM, the Global Fund, the Gates Foundation, Medicines for Malaria Ventures, the American Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene, and the UCSF Malaria Elimination Initiative. She is currently Co-Chair of the Pan-African Mosquito Control Association (PAMCA) Board and a Board member of the Asia Pacific Leaders Malaria Alliance (APLMA). Corine is passionate about strengthening technical and leadership expertise in health institutions in Africa. She holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Rwanda.

Melissa Penny is a Full Professor and the inaugural Fiona Stanley Chair in Child Health Research at the University of Western Australia and The Kids Research Institute Australia, where she heads a research team focusing on infectious disease modelling. Previously she was a Professor at the University of Basel (Switzerland), head of the Disease Modelling research unit at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, and holder of a Swiss National Science Foundation Professorship. She has been a member of multiple WHO technical expert and guidance development groups. Melissa’s research focuses on developing data- and epidemiology-informed mathematical models and artificial intelligence algorithms to understand pathogen, host and intervention dynamics, with the goal to inform decisions during product development through to implementation and policy recommendations, including vaccines and immune therapies. Her research and policy support has mainly focused on malaria, and more recently on SARS-CoV-2 and respiratory viruses. Melissa holds a PhD in Mathematics from Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.

África Periáñez is CEO and Founder of Causal Foundry AI about. She is an AI scientist and entrepreneur. África held the role of Chief Analytics Officer at Inditex, leading the AI strategy and bolstering one of the world's fastest supply chains. Previously, she founded Yokozuna Data, an AI firm based in Tokyo to transform videogame industry. África holds a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Reading and Master's degrees in String Theory and Theoretical Physics from CERN and UAM. She served as a Marie Curie EU research fellow at CERN and worked as a scientist at RIKEN and the German Weather Service.

Professor Charles Wondji is the Executive Director of Centre for Research in Infectious Diseases. He is also a Professor of Genetics at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow in Biomedical Sciences. His main research interest is the understanding of the biology, genetics and genomics of mosquitoes, vectors of tropical diseases such as malaria, lymphatic filariasis and dengue. He is currently studying the mechanisms of insecticide resistance in field populations of Anopheles funestus using a novel genetic mapping, transcriptomics and whole genome sequencing to detect resistance genes and markers. His work has been instrumental in shaping global and national vector control policies. Since 2017 he has been a member of the WHO prequalification team on vector control (PQT-VC) responsible for assessing new insecticide-based vector control products. He has trained several postgraduate students and postdoctoral fellows. He obtained his PhD in 2003 in Cameroon with the French research Institute IRD, working on the population genetics of the malaria vector Anopheles gambiae complex in Cameroon.