Principal Investigators
Dr. Wafaie Fawzi, MPH, MS, DrPH
Professor of Population Sciences, and Professor of Nutrition, Epidemiology, and Global Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Research Interests: Research Areas of Interest: Epidemiology, Maternal & Child Health, Nutrition, Global Health, HIV/AIDS
Dr. Wafaie Fawzi’s research has generated significant new knowledge on the discovery and translation of interventions to enhance maternal and child health and human development, with emphasis on nutritional factors. His research includes the epidemiology of adverse pregnancy outcomes, childhood infections, and HIV, TB and malaria. He established the Nutrition and Global Health Program at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, that addresses and documents existing gaps; advances the research agenda; and convenes multi-disciplinary partners. He also developed two implementation science initiatives to advance adolescent health in Africa and Asia, and the intersectoral integration of agriculture, nutrition and health in Ethiopia and Tanzania. He established the Africa Research, Implementation Science, and Education (ARISE) Network, a partnership of leading academic institutions in Africa, and the China Harvard Africa Network (CHAN) to advance cutting-edge training of public health leaders through South-South-North institutional partnerships.
Dr. Till Bärnighausen, MD, ScD, MSc
Professor and Director of Heidelberg Institute of Global Health (HIGH)
Research Interests: Causal impact of global health interventions on population health, social and economic outcomes
Dr. Till Bärnighausen is Alexander von Humboldt Professor and Director of the Heidelberg Institute of Global Health (HIGH), Faculty of Medicine and University Hospital, University of Heidelberg, Germany. He is also Senior Faculty at the Wellcome Trust’s Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI) in South Africa and a fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. Till’s research focuses on establishing the causal impact of global health interventions on population health, social and economic outcomes. In particular, he works on large-scale population health interventions for HIV, diabetes, hypertension, and vaccine-preventable diseases. Till uses design research to develop interventions and randomized controlled experiments and quasi-experiments to establish intervention impacts. He has developed several new methods for applied population health research.
Prof. Mosa Moshabela, MBChB, M.Med, MSc, PhD
Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation, at the University of KwaZulu-Natal
Infectious disease, health systems and policy, implementation science
Professor Mosa Moshabela, MBChB, M.Med (Family Medicine), PhD (Public health), MSc (Demography and Health), is a Public health expert, and Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation, at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. An esteemed academic and clinician scientist, he held a Wellcome Trust Fellowship (2015 -2018), which strengthened his public and global health research. His contribution has primarily been in the improvement of access and quality healthcare to combat infectious diseases, in relation to HIV and TB, and in the areas of health systems, services and policy research. His research focusing on implementation science cuts across multiple disciplines, and involves the design, implementation and evaluation of complex interventions in healthcare services and programs, and seeks to improve access, quality and equity in healthcare, for resource-poor settings in sub-Saharan Africa.
Prof. Henry Mwambi, MSc, PhD
Research Interests: Statistical modeling and application, Biostatistics, Data Science, Infectious Disease Modelling
Prof. Henry Mwambi leads research on applied statistics, biostatistics and infectious disease modelling at the individual and population level. At the University of KwaZulu-Natal, he has taught theory and applied courses, among them a Biostatistics course covering key areas in biostatistics, namely general epidemiology principles, cohort studies, case-control studies, survival analysis and clinical trials. He is currently working with and has supervised a number of PhD and Masters students on various topics in biostatistics and epidemiology such as the analysis of non-Gaussian longitudinal and clustered disease outcome data, survival analysis, modelling recurrent events, longitudinal data analysis including missing data, and infectious disease modelling. He is keen and passionate to develop and help enhance biostatistics and data science capacity in the Sub-Saharan Africa region and Africa at large. He is currently a Co-PI of a number of landmark projects among them the Sub-Saharan Africa Consortium for Advanced Biostatistics (SSACAB) Training Programme whose aim is to enhance capacity in Biostatistics through MSc, PhD and Postdoctoral training by involving both academic and research institutions to provide supervision and mentorship of fellows.
Training Program Directors
Saloshni Naidoo
, MD, MMed, PhD
Research Interests: TB, Maternal and vhild health, environmental health
Professor Naidoo obtained her medical degree from the University of Natal in 1992, became a Public Health Medicine Specialist in 2003 and an Associate in the Division of Occupational Medicine in the College of Public Health Medicine in 2010. Her academic career spans 17 years, initially as a lecturer in the Discipline of Occupational and Environmental Health, the University of KwaZulu-Natal in 2003 and now as the Head of the Department of Public Health Medicine in the School of Nursing and Public Health in the College of Health Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal; a post which she has held since 2015. She currently enjoys both a national standing and growing international recognition in her chosen field of academic expertise. She is a C2 rated researcher in terms of the National Research Foundation’s rating standard. Amongst the multiple studies in which she is involved, she currently leads a cohort project studying the impact of prenatal pesticide exposure on maternal reproductive health and infant neurodevelopment in KwaZulu- Natal South Africa. Her multiple publications highlight the plight of women working in small-scale agriculture and the risks faced by healthcare workers in the public health sector in South Africa.
Heather Mattie, MS, SM, PhD
Research Interests: Biostatistics, Data Science, Network Science
Dr. Heather Mattie is a Lecturer on Biostatistics and Co-Director of the Health Data Science master’s program in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Mattie’s research focuses on the intersection between biostatistics, data science, and network science. She has developed methods that predict tie strength in a network, which assists in modeling the spread of disease and information. Additionally, her work has examined the potential for artificial intelligence to improve inference from data for care and population health, as well as the challenges related to bias and scalability in such models. Dr. Mattie is also involved in the diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts of the Biostatistics department and enjoys mentoring students.
Heidelberg Team
Sandra Barteit, MSc, PhD
Research Interests: Digital global health, Research Methods, Climate change and health, disease surveillance
Dr. Sandra Barteit’s enthusiasm for Global Health led her to join the Heidelberg University Institute of Global Health as a full-time researcher in 2015. Currently, amongst many other projects, she is leading a project that implements novel measurements of wearables in vulnerable populations in Kenya and Burkina Faso to conduct cutting-edge climate change and health research, which helped to gain new insights into the disease burden in poor populations facing exposure to climate change, such as heat or droughts. Furthermore, she has lead the Blended Learning in Zambia (BLiZ) project that implements blended learning to strengthen medical education at the largest medical University in Zambia. In her research, she applies a variety of analytics models and cross-cutting analytics modeling concepts and cases.
Ina Danquah, MSc, PhD
Research Interests: Nutrition epidemiology, sustainable nutrition, climate change adaptation
Dr. Ina Danquah has trained in nutrition science and epidemiology and has obtained her PhD in Tropical Medicine from Charité – Universitaetsmedizin Berlin, Germany. She has strong research interests in dietary risk factors for infectious diseases, obesity and type
2 diabetes, particularly among African populations under transition. Ina leads a research group on climate change, nutrition and health with the ambition i) to define impacts on dietary habits and nutritional status, ii) to design, implement and evaluate climate change adaptation strategies, and iii) to determine the health co-benefits of climate change mitigation actions. Ina coordinates a large consortium on climate change and health in sub-Saharan Africa, and is Robert Bosch Junior Professor for Sustainable Nutrition in sub-Saharan Africa. She has published more than 90 peer-reviewed articles, has an h-index of 23 and an i10-index of 45. Her work has been cited more than 2100 times.