The Post Graduate Diploma in Global Health Research is guided by a dedicated team of academics, lecturers, tutors, and administrative staff. Each member is committed to delivering the course with professionalism, convenience, and excellence.
Professor Trudie Lang, Academic Lead
Trudie spent the first 12 years of her career in the pharmaceutical industry where she ran clinical trials from phase I through to phase IV in malaria, helminth infectious and diarrheal disease in Africa, Asia and South America. Trudie has worked within the varied settings of industry, public private partnerships, the World Health Organisation, NGOs and academia where she has designed and operated clinical studies in highly varied international settings, particularly in low resource areas within vulnerable populations. Trudie is now focused on developing research capacity and improving research methods in developing countries. She devised The Global Health Network which is a global decentralised franchise network that is driving equity in where research happens, who leads and who benefits from the evidence. It works by transferring know-how and exchanging knowledge between organisations, disease areas, regions, and roles and by guiding faster and improved research processes. This platform is working online and, in the regions, to improve and encourage clinical research in places, situations and places where research is lacking, such as diseases of poverty and outbreaks.
Dr Elizabeth Allen, Acting Course Director
Elizabeth is a pharmacist by background with an MPH and PhD Clinical Pharmacology. She worked in the UK and South African pharmaceutical industries, then academic clinical research, leading operations for the University of Cape Town’s MRC Collaborating Centre for Optimising Antimalarial Therapy, overseeing all types of clinical studies and methodology research. Until recently she was Strategic Partnerships Lead for The Global Health Network, contributing to enabling equity in health research by improving methods, building careers and sharing knowledge. In other roles, she has managed the Southern African Regional Centre for the Infectious Diseases Data Observatory, working on individual patient data meta-analyses and capacity for equitable data sharing. She is co-lead for the UK MRC-NIHR Trials Methodology Research Partnership Global Health Working Group, is on the International Scientific Committee for VolREthics, an initiative proposing good practices to protect healthy volunteers in research, and she teaches and supervises post-graduate students in pharmacovigilance and trial conduct.
Dr Tim Grant
Dr Timothy Grant has over 25 years of experience in health research including clinical trials, epidemiology, and health economics. With degrees in engineering, biostatistics, and educational psychology he has broad experience conducting scientific trials as well as working with observational data. Dr Grant’s primary role is in measurement and analysis of data with a focus on health-related topics. In addition to working commercial enterprises, he has contributed to many studies at the grass roots level, enabling doctors and nurses to contribute directly to the improvement of heath care. Tim also has experience in education, having lectured at undergraduate and graduate levels. Most recently, he has taught multiple on-line courses to multinational audiences. As a Biostatical Fellow for StatisticaMedica, a small statistical CRO, he is regularly involved with study design, method selection, and guiding clinical researchers in the development of actionable research plans.
Dr Brenda Okech
Brenda Okech is the Director at UVRI-IAVI vaccine program in Entebbe, Uganda. UVRI-IAVI works with the fishing communities around Lake Victoria which is a key population in the fight against HIV. UVRI-IAVI HIV vaccine program has a vision of a world free of AIDS. Her major interests are in understanding natural immunity, Clinical Trials and prevention of Infectious Diseases like HIV and Malaria. Her long term goal is to have impact in reducing poverty through contributing to capacity building and promoting good health. She has experience in managing multiple country projects and was Project Manager for the EDCTP funded GMZ2 consortium for 5 years. The GMZ2 consortium involved a vaccine trial in 4 countries with partners from 7 countries. Brenda has over 20 years’ experience in human health research and management. Brenda has a PhD in Immunology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical medicine.
Dr Morenike Ukpong
Dr Morenike Oluwatoyin Folayan is a Professor of Paediatric Dentistry at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife in Osun State Nigeria. She holds a Masters in Business Administration and another in Education Administration and Leadership. She also holds the Fellowship of the West African College of Surgeons. She has served in various capacities in multiple national and internationally associations, committees, and projects, and as a peer reviewer for many high impact factor health related journals. She is a member of multiple research groups, has authored and edited more than 15 books and book chapters and has over 330 journal publications. She has an excellent track record of working with the community for the community to enhance the voices of stigmatized and vulnerable populations. She is a Fellow of the Nigeria Academy of Science.
Noni Mumba
Noni Mumba heads the Community Engagement Platform at KWTRP in Kilifi, Kenya. She aims to strengthen relations and build a mutual understanding between researchers and communities, by developing best practice strategies, mentoring and building capacity, as well as monitoring and evaluating engagement activities. Lessons of quality science communication eventually inspire communities and scientists alike.
Laura Merson
Laura’s early career was spent in Sri Lanka, Canada and Vietnam, focused on the design and implementation of clinical studies in low-resource settings. She has managed studies across 6 continents, including therapeutic trials in Ebola virus disease, influenza, bubonic plague, mpox, dengue and thalassemia. As the Head of Oxford University’s Clinical Trials Unit in Vietnam, Laura spent 6 years focused on building clinical trials capacity across Asia and developed her research interests in changing the paradigm of public health emergency response to integrate rapid, collaborative clinical research.
Now, based at the University of Oxford as Head of Data for ISARIC, Laura works in partnership with the World Health Organization and the network of ISARIC collaborators building standards in data collection, governance and analysis during outbreaks. She led the design and implementation of the ISARIC Data Platform, a project that is now the world’s largest international collection of accessible data on individuals hospitalized with COVID-19.
Dr Fernando Rubinstein
Fernando is a primary care physician and epidemiologist from Argentina, with a long-standing experience in research and teaching in applied research methods for public health.
His main research areas of interest are the impact of treatment strategies and social interventions to reduce treatment default rates in patients with Tuberculosis, barriers of access to health care, health services research, applied clinical epidemiology and research methods, causal inference in observational studies, and prevention in primary care.
He joined The Global Health Network (TGHN) in October 2023 where he works with the team and regional partners to advance research capacity building activities, developing training plans, tools, resources, and other materials related to clinical research, and plans and delivers workshops and career development events. Fernando also coordinates and provides editorial oversight of the Global Health Training Centreand development of training materials, resources and programmes.
Josephine Bourner
Josie is a Senior Clinical Trials Manager in the ISARIC group with 8 years’ experience working in various trial management roles for a variety of diseases and therapies. In her current role, she manages a randomised controlled trial of two treatment regimens for bubonic plague in Madagascar, an Expanded Access Programme of tecovirimat for mpox and non-randomised diagnostic trial in the Central African Republic, and a multi-country observational study for mpox in Europe. She also recently led methodological projects for Lassa fever trials and she is in the final year of her DPhil which focuses on improving endpoint selection in clinical trials for difficult-to-study infectious diseases.
Dr Shermarke Hassan
Shermarke is an epidemiologist at the Infectious Diseases Data Observatory (IDDO). He has a background in medicine and epidemiology (MSc, PhD). Previously, he has been involved in the design, execution and analysis of clinical and observational studies in the area of haemophilia (a rare bleeding disorder) and COVID-19. In his current role, he is involved in the data curation and statistical analysis of COVID-19 data.
Dr Francois van Loggerenberg
Francois is a Charted Psychologist and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society, a Teaching Fellow at the University of Oxford and a Research Fellow in the Youth Resilience Unit at Queen Mary's University. He trained as a research psychologist in South Africa and has a PhD in Public Health Medicine from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine investigating behavioural interventions to enhance adherence to antiretroviral therapy. Since 1997 he has lectured in various capacities at the post-graduate level, mostly in Psychology, Criminology, and Statistics and Research Methods, including for qualitative and mixed methods. He was previously Scientific Lead for the Global Health Network and a Trial Manager in the Department of Psychiatry, testing an intervention to address perinatal depression in HIV positive mothers in rural South Africa. At Queen Mary he was most recently PI on a study to adapt and test the DIALOG+ intervention in school children in Colombia, post-conflict and in the light of the challenges of COVID-19. He currently works on a large cohort of primary school children in east London looking at better understanding the development of emotional resilience.
Havana Chikoto
Havana Chikoto is a seasoned drug development professional with over 15 years of experience in global clinical trial management. He spent 5 of those years in a Clinical Research Organization and is now in his 11th year in Big Pharma. He drives the efficient conduct of trials, particularly in historically resource-poor settings, to bring innovative medicines to patients who needs them most. He is also passionate about capacity building he actively works to empower research sites and investigators, ensuring that trials are conducted with the highest standards of quality and ethics.
Dr Jean Claude Udahemuka
Jean Claude has been teaching at the University of Rwanda, Department of Veterinary Medicine (since 2012). He has conducted several research projects with a special focus on animal infectious diseases at the wildlife-livestock-human interface in LMIC settings (Rwanda, DRC) (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8370-7113). He has been a consultant with international organizations (UNFAO) in the sector of animal health (Infectious diseases) both at the headquarters (based in Rome) and in the East African Region (based in Kigali). He is currently collaborating with scientists from DTU (Denmark), Erasmus MC (The Netherlands) and the Oxford University (UK) on different research projects involving vaccines, molecular diagnostics, molecular epidemiology and sequencing of infectious pathogens and has joined the Global Health Network Rwanda chapter as it was being established early 2024. Jean Claude speaks four languages fluently (Kinyarwanda, English, French and Swahili).
Professor Rachida Soulaymani
Ghita Benabdallah
Houda Sefiani
Emmanuelle Denis
Emmanuelle is a molecular biologist and biomedical scientist by training, her current role being Senior Operations Manager for the Epidemic diseases clinical research group (ERGO) within the University of Oxford’s Pandemic Sciences Institute. In this role, she has overall responsibly for tracking, monitoring and resource planning for ERGO's multi-million-pound research portfolio. She previously worked as a Clinical Trial Manager and has over twenty years’ experience in running international, multi-centre trials in the pharmaceutical industry and in academia. She also has considerable experience in training and teaching clinical research topics, has tutored for the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s distance-learning MSc in Clinical Trials and helped to develop the curriculum for the Clinical REsearch During Outbreaks (CREDO) training programme.
Josephine Bourner
Josie is a Senior Clinical Trials Manager in the ISARIC group with 8 years’ experience working in various trial management roles for a variety of diseases and therapies. In her current role, she manages a randomised controlled trial of two treatment regimens for bubonic plague in Madagascar, an Expanded Access Programme of tecovirimat for mpox and non-randomised diagnostic trial in the Central African Republic, and a multi-country observational study for mpox in Europe. She also recently led methodological projects for Lassa fever trials and she is in the final year of her DPhil which focuses on improving endpoint selection in clinical trials for difficult-to-study infectious diseases.
Nina Jamieson
Nina has more than 20 years of experience within the medical research environment, initially as a Trial Manager, working on large multi-national clinical trials in maternal and child health, later transitioning to training and capacity strengthening - leveraging my prior exposure in delivering specialised training for clinical trials. She is the Senior Capacity Development Manager for ISARIC sharing responsibility for defining the depth and breadth of the training programme for ISARIC’s training curricula, building research preparedness capacity through the development and implementation of training activities, membership engagement, managing the Career Development Fellowships, and running study activation exercises.
Elizabeth Nuthall
Elizabeth is a senior trial manager at NPEU working on the TOAST, POLAR and neoGASTRIC trials.
Elizabeth studied Zoology at Nottingham University then worked in the pharmaceutical industry for 15 years, involved in clinical trials in a variety of roles including project and staff management. For the last 12 years, she has worked as Trial and Operational Managers at the University of Oxford. She has worked in the Oxford Vaccine Group, the Department of Psychiatry and since Jan 2022 at NPEU.
- Lauren Whelan, acting Course Coordinator - Lauren.whelan@ndm.ox.ac.uk
- Graham Cockerill, Academic Programme Officer - pgdip-ghr@ndm.ox.ac.uk