Malaria Advisory Group
The Malaria Advisory Group (MAG) is responsible for advising the Trustees of the
Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) how monies raised should be spent.
The MAG is made up of some of the world's leading malaria experts. The group has
extensive experience both in the strategies used to combat malaria and in the implementation
of malaria programmes.
The locations of the MAG members bears no relation to where nets are distributed.
We also liaise with others with relevant malaria expertise in many other parts of
the world.
All spending decisions will be detailed on this website ensuring complete transparency
of our actions.
Malaria Advisory Group members
The Group will liaise with a broad array of individuals and organisations as it
formulates advice on how the money raised should be spent.
Dr Sylvia Meek
Sylvia is an internationally recognised advisor with over 28 years experience working
on malaria and other vector-borne disease control.
She is the Technical Director of the Malaria Consortium, a non-governmental organisation working
at country, regional and international level, supporting the control of malaria
and other communicable diseases. Sylvia's work includes technical advice, especially
on programme design, management and evaluation and on antimalarial treatment policy,
and implementation oversight to all Malaria Consortium projects and activities.
Sylvia is on the Roll Back Malaria
(RBM) Working Group
on Case Management.
Professor Bob Snow
Bob Snow has worked in Africa for the last 25 years. He is Professor of
Tropical Public Health at the University of Oxford and head
of the Malaria Public Health and Epidemiology Group at the Kenyan Medical Research
Institute in Nairobi, Kenya.
His work began with the first clinical trials of Insecticide-treated bed nets in
The Gambia and has developed into a large programme of work in Kenya on the public
health burden of malaria in Africa and understanding ways in which this can be reduced
through scientifically proven methods of intervention, effective partnerships with
African governments and appropriate financing.
He has published over 300 articles on malaria, is the Director of Malaria Atlas Project, is a technical advisor to the Kenyan
Government and sits on a number of international malaria advisory panels. He is
supported by the Wellcome Trust
(UK) and lives in Nairobi with his wife and three children.
Dr Ayo Palmer
Ayo is an experienced paediatrician and is Deputy Director of
CIAM - Public Health research & Development Centre in The
Gambia.
CIAM is an NGO focussing on operational research; the development, implementation,
monitoring and evaluation of innovative health models, approaches and tools; community
based health promotion; and, technical assistance and capacity building. CIAM is
one of four
Gates Malaria Training Centres in sub-Saharan Africa focussing on developing
innovative approaches for the control of malaria. As a public health practitioner
she has extensive experience working at all levels of the health care system in
The Gambia including working with UNICEF and community based organisations to set
up sustainable health programmes. Ayo’s work includes providing technical advice
to the Ministry of Health and the National Malaria Control Programme especially
on technical programme design, management and evaluation and on antimalarial treatment
policy.
She has many years experience of programme development and the monitoring and evaluation
of projects to ensure malaria interventions are practical, workable and accessible
to households.
Professor Nick White
Nick has worked in Thailand since 1981 and has been Director of the
Wellcome Trust – Mahidol – Oxford Tropical Medicine
Research Programme from 1986 to 2001. In 1990 he founded the
Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Unit in Viet Nam and
has been overall Chairman of the Oxford University – Wellcome Trust South-east Asian
Units since then. He is also an Honorary Consultant Physician at the
John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.
Nick's diverse interests include the epidemiology, pathophysiology and management
of uncomplicated and severe malaria, meliodosis, enteric fever, tetanus, dengue
haemorrhagic fever, Japanese encephalitis and tuberculosis. His particular interests
at present include the pathophysiology and treatment of severe malaria and the prevention
of antimalarial drug resistance using artemisinin-based combinations. He is a Wellcome Trust Principal
Research Fellow, a Fellow of the
Academy of Medical Sciences, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1999
was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his research work on tropical illnesses
in South-east Asia.
Dr Abdisalan Mohamed Noor
Dr Noor joined the Malaria Public Health & Epidemiology Group (MPHEG)/Kenya Medical
Research Institute (KEMRI)-Wellcome Trust Research Programme in Nairobi in 2000
and was instrumental in developing a national spatial infrastructure of health services
in Kenya. He is a member of the Monitoring and Evaluation Technical Working Group
of the Division of Malaria Control, Ministry of Health, Kenya and currently leads
malaria field trials work in Somalia.
He completed his Ph.D. on spatial models of access to and use of government health
services in Kenya in 2005 with the Open University, UK, in collaboration with the
MPHEG and the University of Oxford. He has recently been awarded a Wellcome Trust
Research Training Fellowship investigating the spatial and socio-economic determinants
of access to and use of health interventions among rural African communities, particularly
understanding and modeling the dynamics of insecticide treated net uptake.
Abdisalan graduated with a BSc from the University of Nairobi, Department of Geospatial
& Space Technology in 1999. He is an honorary lecturer at the University of Nairobi
and has close links with several other Government of Kenya institutions. He is also
an Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at the Nuffield Department of Medicine, University
of Oxford.
Dr. Julie Makani
Julie Makani is a lecturer at Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences
(
MUHAS), which is the main
clinical, academic and research centre in Tanzania.
Her two related areas of interest are malaria and Sickle Cell Disease (SCD), an inherited blood disorder. She received a Training fellowship from the Wellcome Trust to establish a systematic framework for comprehensive research and care, with one of the largest cohorts of SCD patients in Africa. SCD presents great opportunities for integrating clinical, epidemiological, patho-physiological and genetic research and to test the paradigm of translation of research in genomic medicine into improvement in health.
SCD confers protection against the malaria infection and MUHAS is a collaborative site for the Malaria Genomic Epidemiology Network (MalariaGEN) Grand Challenges Programme which attempts to combine human genome technologies with large-scale epidemiological studies. an initiative identifying mechanisms of protective immunity, critical in vaccine development.
She is a member of the Royal College of Physicians of United Kingdom, and holds an appointment as Clinical Research Fellow at the Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford.
Professor Steve Lindsay
Professor Steve Lindsay is a disease ecologist with a passion for studying some of the world’s most important vector-borne diseases; chiefly malaria, lymphatic filariasis and trachoma.
He has considerable experience in medical entomology, parasitology, ecology and clinical epidemiology and solves pure and applied problems in the laboratory and field using a wide range of techniques from DNA finger-printing and mathematical modelling, to methods used by social scientists, epidemiologists and biologists.
His particular interest is in the design of simple tools for malaria control and he has carried out field research in The Gambia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Thailand and Uganda over the last 18 years.
He has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers, many in major international journals.
He was in one of the leading group of researchers to demonstrate that insecticide-treated bednets protected children against malaria.
More recently he was part of the team that showed that Musca sorbens, the Bazaar fly, was an important vector of trachoma, and that this blinding disease could be prevented by effective fly control.
Past members
Professor Brian Greenwood
Brian is the Manson Professor of Clinical Tropical Medicine at the
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) where
he coordinates a malaria research capacity development consortium in Africa - the
Malaria Capacity Development Consortium
(MCDC)
Brian has over 40 years experience in the malaria field in both research and programme
implementation and is regarded as one of the world's leading malariologists. He
has lived and worked in West Africa for much of this time.
Dr Grace Malenga
Grace is a paediatrician and is the Director of the
Malaria Alert Centre in The Malawi College of Medicine.
The centre's work involves malaria control at the village level and advising on
malaria response in health centres and district hospitals. Grace has worked for the
Government of Malawi health service as a district and regional health officer
and for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as a health
coordinator for the Mozambican refugee health programme in Malawi.
Grace trained at the University of Bristol, England and the University of
Nairobi, Kenya and is a senior lecturer in the College of Medicine at the
University of Malawi.