Professor Catherine (Sassy) Molyneux (Co-Investigator). Sassy Molyneux is a Professor of Global Health, employed by Oxford University, UK, based at the Kenya Medical Research Institute-Wellcome Trust Research Programme in Kilifi, Kenya. She is a behavioural scientist, with a background in human geography. Her current main research interests include health system finance and governance, household treatment-seeking behaviour and affordability of health care, responsiveness of health systems to user and population priorities and concerns, and research ethics. Professor Molyneux also supports strategic planning around ethical issues that emerge during research across the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust programme in Kenya, and contributes to social science, health systems research and research ethics training at the centre and internationally.
Dr Helen Walls (Co-Investigator). Dr Walls is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Health and Development at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She is a public health researcher interested in understanding the impact of and addressing through governance and policy the structural determinants of population health. Her research has covered several key areas of global health, including trade in health services, and migration and health system responses. She is a Research Associate of the University of the Witwatersrand, and an Honorary Senior Fellow of the University of Melbourne.
Dr Jill Olivier (Co-Investigator). Dr Olivier is an Associate Professor in Health Policy and Systems at the University of Cape Town (UCT). She has experience as a researcher and research manager in countries across Africa, the Asia-Pacific region and the Americas – holding a South African National Research Foundation B-rating. She is currently the Principal Investigator of several large multi-country grants, including a grant from the WHO (on non-state providers in Ghana), and another from the UK MRC (on health system responsiveness in South Africa and Kenya). Her current work focuses on topics such as non-profit non-state health providers; intersectionality; health systems resilience and responsiveness; community system strengthening; health system histories; and communication and cultures within health systems.
Dr Johanna Hanefeld (PrincipaI Investigator). Dr Hanefeld is an Associate Professor in Health Policy and Systems and lead of the LSHTM office in Berlin. Her work focuses on the political economy of global health. Dr Hanefeld’s current research is on health systems, including resilience and quality, and on the impact of medical travel and migration. It includes policy analysis on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in Pakistan and Cambodia, work on trade and health including with the WTO, on governance and health inequalities. Actor power and network analysis are central themes across this programme of work. All Dr Hanefeld’s research is empirical and most of it has been situated in low- and middle-income countries. She also has an active interest in the development of policy analysis methods.
Professor Lucy Gilson (Co-Investigator). Lucy Gilson is a Professor in Health Policy and Systems with a joint appointment at the LSHTM/University of Cape Town (UCT). Her research broadly focusses on how to strengthen health systems to offer better public value, with particular concern for health equity. She has a track record of research around: health policy implementation; decentralisation, district health systems and primary health care; user fees and financing issues; and leadership and management. As she has a particular interest in understanding health system actors’ decision-making, Professor Gilson’s work also considers how trust and power relations shape health system dynamics and complexity. She is also involved in a wider range of capacity development activities within the field of Health Policy and Systems Research.
Dr Moeketsi Modisenyane (Co-Investigator). Dr Modisenyane is a Health Policy and Systems researcher. He also holds the position of Director: International Health Development and Support at the National Department of Health, South Africa where he is involved in providing overall technical leadership in global health programming, with a special focus on strengthening health and social systems in the public sector. In addition, he is involved in designing, implementing, monitoring, and evaluating regional health and development projects mainly in Southern Africa, including mobilising resources for national and regional projects.
Professor Richard Smith (Co-Investigator). Richard Smith is Professor of Health Economics and also Deputy Pro-Vice Chancellor at the University of Exeter College of Medicine and Health, joining in 2018 after 10 years at the LSHTM where he was Dean of Faculty of Public Health and Policy. His work spans micro-economics (e.g. econometric analysis of large data, and behavioural economics involving experiments), but also pioneering the application of macro-economic modelling to health issues. He has been involved in work on trade and health, especially health services, for some 15 years, including co-editing a major series in The Lancet in 2009.
Dr Karima Manji (Researcher). Dr Manji is a Research Assistant in the Department of Global Health and Development at the LSHTM. She is a guest lecturer on domestic violence at the Charité University in Berlin, where she also supervises Masters students in International Health. Her PhD from the LSHTM applied social norms theory to explore how gender norms sustain intimate partner violence in Tanzania. She has worked as a research consultant for Save the Children UK, the Gender, Violence and Health Centre (GVHC) of the LSHTM, the Medical Research Council (MRC) UK, and the Department for International Development (DFID), on applying social norms theory to advance social justice issues.
Dr Langelihle Mlotshwa (Researcher). Dr Mlotshwa is a post-doctoral researcher at the African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS), University of the Witwatersrand. She completed her doctoral studies at the University of Basel (Switzerland); her work focused on sexual practices of both men and women, social norms surrounding these practices, and reasons for risk-taking during pregnancy, as a way to understand and overcome incident HIV and barriers caused by gender inequality and other matters. For a decade she has researched public health matters in rural and urban South Africa. Her interests include sexual and reproductive health, migration, gender, HIV/AIDS, maternal health and understanding the dynamics of the changing family, and how this impacts on HIV/AIDS in poor resource settings.
Thea de Gruchy (Researcher). Thea de Gruchy is a post-doctoral researcher at the African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS), University of the Witwatersrand. She has been researching and writing about migration and health since 2015. Her PhD uses the development and implementation of policy and programmatic interventions – by both state and humanitarian actors – to improve the access that migrant farm workers have to health care along the South African-Zimbabwean border, to explore questions of governance, decision making, and sustainability.