GHRU Team Members

Esther Garibay

Communications and Impact Manager

Esther is the Communications and Impact Manager for the Department of Global Health and Infection based at Brighton and Sussex Medical School. She is responsible for the day to day comms strategy for the department, particularly taking research findings and developing them into messages for policy, practitioner, media and lay audiences. She has over 15 years’ experience working in various comms and project management related roles for the academic and NGO sector. She completed her BA in Communication Science at ITESO University in Mexico, and has a MA in Transnational Communication and Global Media from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Professor Gail Davey

Co-Investigator, BSMS

Professor Gail Davey is Co-Director of the 5-S Foundation and Professor of Global Health Epidemiology at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School.  She trained at Master and doctoral level at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. She moved to Ethiopia for 9 years to work with national colleagues in the School of Public Health, Addis Ababa University. There, she initiated a multidisciplinary program of research into podoconiosis. The programme has covered distribution, aetiology, consequences, management of disease and also to raise the local and international profile of podoconiosis, advocating for inclusion in the WHO list of Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs). In 2010, Gail returned to the UK on a Wellcome Trust University Award to expand podoconiosis research within Ethiopia and other endemic countries.

Grit Gansch

Finance Officer – BSMS

Grit is a licensed accountant and fellow member of AAT as well as a part-qualified chartered accountant with ACCA. She has gained valuable work experience in the private and public sector in various roles.

Heather Cordell

Collaborator – University of Newcastle

Heather Cordell is Professor of Statistical Genetics, and the holder of a Wellcome Investigator Award in Science, in the Population Health Sciences Institute at Newcastle University, UK. The research interests of her group are the development and application of statistical methodology to genetic studies of complex disease. View her profile here.

Jo Middleton

Research Fellow – BSMS

Jo Middleton is a biologist trained in medical and veterinary acarology. He collaborates with research in Life Sciences at the University of Sussex and Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences at University of Brighton. Much of Jo’s research and teaching involves interrelated work at two very different scales, that of microscopic parasites (specifically acarines) and that of Planetary Health.

Jennifer Wilburn

Programmes Manager

Jenni is the Programme Manager for both NIHR 5S Foundation and GHRU2 based at Brighton and Sussex Medical School. She has worked in Research Administration and Management for about 13 years working on projects across all disciplines and funders. Her previous role was Head of Post Award Services at the University of Brighton where shewas responsible for their portfolio of research and enterprise awards from an award management and compliance perspective.  She is really enjoying being part of the project team again in her current role and supporting the amazing research that takes place across the programme. She has a keen interest in career development, capacity planning and training which link closely to the aims of both programmes.

Dr Maya Semrau

Senior Research Fellow

Dr Maya Semrau is a Senior Research Fellow in implementation research at the Brighton & Sussex Medical School (BSMS). Maya has worked at BSMS since 2017 on the NIHR Global Health Research Unit for NTDs, for which she currently co-leads the Implementation Research Theme, which involves implementation research projects in Ethiopia, Rwanda and Sudan – she is particularly interested in the mental wellbeing and stigma aspects of NTDs. Maya also co-convenes the Working Group on Mental Wellbeing and Stigma of the Neglected Tropical Disease NGO Network (NNN)’s Disease Management, Disability and Inclusion (DMDI) cross-cutting group. In addition, she is involved in the 5S Foundation programme at BSMS, as well as the Indigo mental health stigma reduction programme led by King’s College London (KCL). Maya has a background in global mental health research, which followed on from her PhD in ‘International Public Mental Health’ obtained at KCL in 2013. She also holds MSc degrees in ‘Mental Health Services Research’ (KCL) and ‘Experimental Psychology’ (University of Sussex), as well as a BSc in ‘Human Sciences’ (University of Sussex). View her profile here.

Professor Melanie Newport

Co-Investigator – BSMS

Melanie Newport is Professor in Infectious Diseases and Global Health at Brighton and Sussex Medical School. She graduated with distinction from St Mary’s Hospital Medical School, University of London, and trained in clinical infectious diseases in the UK and The Gambia. She has been a consultant physician since 2003.  Melanie joined Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS) in 2004, just after it opened.

She has led the strategic development of Global Health, a core BSMS theme. This includes the establishment of the Clinical Elective module, the Global Health MSc course and a vibrant research programme that has an international reputation for taking a multidisciplinary approach to tackle conditions that disproportionately affect poor and vulnerable communities living in low-income countries.

Dr Natalia Ivashikina

Senior Health Economist – BSMS

Dr Natalia Ivashikina is a Senior Lecturer in Global Health Economics at Brighton and Sussex Medical School. Her research expertise covers economic evaluation of health care interventions, decision analytical modelling, systematic literature review and methodology of clinical trials. Natalia has special interest in neglected tropical diseases and applied health economics evaluations in low- and middle-income countries. She is currently a principal/co-investigator on four research projects including studies of neglected tropical diseases in Ethiopia and Sudan, optimising clinical monitoring of HIV-positive patients in South Africa and evaluation of non-medical prescribing in the UK.

Rachel Jackson

Project Support Officer – BSMS

Rachel is the Project Support Officer for the Department of Global Health and Infection based at Brighton and Sussex Medical School. She is responsible for supporting the research activities of two major research units; the NIHR Global Health Research Unit for Neglected Tropical Diseases and the NIHR 5-S Foundation. Prior to working at BSMS, she gained experience working for NGOs based in Brazil, Argentina and Peru and more recently in the UK Public Health sector. She completed her BA in Hispanic Studies at the University of Liverpool and then went onto gain her MA in Social Development at the University of Sussex, with a specialised focus on access to health services for disabled and Deaf communities.

Professor Shahaduz Zaman

Collaborator – BSMS

Professor Zaman Shahaduz has an interdisciplinary background with degrees in Medical Anthropology, Public Health and Medicine. He has more than 15 years of experience in conducting research and teaching in global public health. His research interests include hospital ethnography, Socio-cultural aspects of communicable and non-communicable diseases, death dying and end of life, refugee health, role of art in heath interventions, health policy and health systems in low income countries and medical history. He has conducted research in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Vietnam, Turkey, Tunisia, Lebanon, and Syria. He has received research grants from ESRC, AHRC, MRC, British Academy and WHO.  Zaman is also a notable fiction writer in Bengali literature and the recipient of the ‘Bangla Academy Award 2016’ which is the highest national literary award in Bangladesh.

Stephen Bremner

Collaborator – BSMS

Stephen is Professor of Medical Statistics at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School, based in the Department of Primary Care and Public Health and also the Brighton and Sussex Clinical Trials Unit since 2015 when he was appointed as senior lecturer. Since his Bachelor’s in mathematical sciences, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, and his Master’s in medical statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, he has acquired >25 years’ experience in applied health and medical research. Initially, as a research assistant, he worked on the short-term effects of air pollution on human health at St. George’s, University of London where he also obtained his PhD in primary care epidemiology using electronic patient records. Subsequently, he was a lecturer at the Pragmatic Clinical Trials Unit and the Unit for Social and Community Psychiatry, Queen Mary University of London. Since 2017, Stephen has supported the quantitative research aspects of Phase 1 of the Global Health Research Unit and continues as a collaborator on Phase 2. His main research interests are in all aspects of pilot and feasibility studies as well as in the design and analysis of pragmatic randomised trials of complex interventions in community settings, particularly in mental health. View his profile here.

Tom Barker

Impact Specialist

Tom Barker is the Senior Health Convenor in the Health and Nutrition Cluster of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), UK. He has 19 years of experience working in knowledge brokering, research communication, policy engagement, and parliamentary influencing in the UK health, global health, and international development policy arenas. Collaborate with partners in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, and at regional and global levels on projects funded by the likes of UK NIHR, GCRF and the Swiss Government. Communications Manager for the Health Systems Global health policy and systems research and practice network with more than 1,600 members in over 110 countries. He was previously the Policy Influence and Research Uptake Manager for the UK DFID-funded Future Health Systems research consortium. His previous experience includes managing a research knowledge brokering network for the UK NIHR Health Services and Delivery Research Programme; facilitating engagements with the UK Parliament and Whitehall for the NHS Confederation, a membership body for UK NHS organisations; and running the UK All Party Parliamentary Group on Primary Care and Public Health. He has a MSc Development Studies from SOAS, University of London.

Victoria Hall

Post Doctoral Research Fellow – BSMS

Victoria Hall is a Socio-Cultural and Medical Anthropologist with a BA from the University of Cambridge, an MSc in Social and Cultural Anthropology (with a specialisation in Medical Anthropology) from the University of Oxford, and an MSc in Global Health from BSMS. She is currently in the final stages of her PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. During her PhD, Victoria specialised in concepts of self, personhood, ontology, cosmology, and religious pluralism in the Himalayan region of north India. This was placed within a framework of interests in the ethical and moral, health and practices of care, expressive form and perceptions of the embodied self, and socio-political and socio-economic differences and/or difficulties amongst migrant, refugee, and socially vulnerable groups. 

Dr Vasso Anagnostopoulou

Research Fellow in Medical Statistics – BSMS

Vasso is a Research Fellow in Medical Statistics at the Brighton & Sussex Medical School. After completing her PhD in Mathematics at Queen Mary, University of London, she held postdoctoral positions at Queen Mary, Imperial College London and TU Dresden. She joined BSMS in 2019 and currently works as a statistician in the NIHR Global Health Research Unit for Neglected Tropical Diseases, the NIHR 5-S Foundation, and the Clinical Trials Unit (REDUCe2 Study).