The ISoGH Secretariat is based in Edinburgh, UK. It manages the publication of the JoGH group of journals, organises Summer Schools and the ISoGH Annual Conference. The Secretariat also notifies ISoGH’s members of job advertisements and funding opportunities in global health, coordinates research priority setting exercises and publishes ISoGH’s Annual Report. Members of the Secretariat are:
Professor Igor Rudan is joint Director of the Centre for Global Health and World Health Organisation (WHO)’s Collaborating Centre for Population Health Research and Training at the University of Edinburgh. He served as a consultant of the WHO, UNICEF, the World Bank, Save the Children, the Gates Foundation and other organisations active in global health. He published more than 600 research articles, won more than 30 research grants, and received more than 20 international awards for his work. He is co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Global Health. He developed the CHNRI method and the EQUIST and PATHS tools which have been widely used for prioritising investments in global health research and development.
Ms Rachael Atherton is a co-founder and co-director of the International Society of Global Health, with a particular focus on financial and constitutional matters. She is the managing editor of the Journal of Global Health, and co-founder of the Journal of Global Health Reports. She leads the publication and distribution of all global health books under the JoGH imprint, including technical and popular science books. Rachael is interested in global health philanthropy and effective altruism. Outside global health, she is a numeracy, literacy and digital/life skills tutor within Edinburgh’s community education sector.
Mr Davies Adeloye is a medical doctor, global health expert and epidemiologist with extensive clinical, research and teaching experience in the United Kingdom and Africa. He is a co-founder and co-director of the International Society of Global Health. He obtained his PhD degree in 2014 at the University of Edinburgh under the prestigious Charles Darwin International Fellowship. He is a researcher at the Centre for Global Health, Usher Institute, University of Edinburgh, UK. He also holds an adjunct Senior Lectureship in Epidemiology and Community Health at the University of Ilorin, Nigeria. He is a co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Global Health Reports and a member of the European Respiratory Society, Pan African Thoracic Society, American Association for Cancer Research, World Association of Medical Editors, and European Association of Science Editors. His main research interests are global health and epidemiology of chronic respiratory diseases, including COPD, asthma, allergies and lung cancer.
Dr Smruti Patel is a Primary Health Care Physician with more than 30 years of experience and a Masters in Public Health. She has worked in a variety of settings in England, South Africa, New York and Washington, DC. She has extensive experience in providing clinical care to a wide variety of patients and has conducted HIV prevention clinical trials. She has trained a wide variety of healthcare workers and provided public health expertise in a global setting. She is the co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Global Health Reports.
Mr Goran Krstic is a builder of both structures and organisations. He is the Secretary-General of the International Society of Global Health. He has decades of work experience in administering membership organisations. He loves to bring order wherever he goes, which is why he is popular mostly among bees and ants.
Professor Wei Wang commenced his role as Pro-Vice-Chancellor (China) of Edith Cowan University (ECU) in February 2017. Prior to joining ECU, Professor Wang was Vice Director-Research of Peking University-Hong Kong University of Sciences & Technology Medical Centre in Shenzhen, Vice Dean of School of Life Science, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Dean of School of Public Health and Family Medicine, Capital Medical University, Beijing, China and Professor, Public Health, Edith Cowan University, Australia. He has published over 200 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals. He served as a consultant for WHO on Public Health in Developing Countries and for the OECD initiative on Public Health Genomics. He is the Australian Representative for the European Association of Preventive, Predictive and Personalised Medicine (EPMA).
Professor Gary L. Darmstadt is Associate Dean for Maternal and Child Health at the Stanford University School of Medicine, where he works as a Professor of Neonatal and Developmental Medicine, Faculty Director of the Global Center for Gender Equality, and Faculty Director of the MENA Health Program in the Department of Pediatrics. In 2022 he served a half-time sabbatical with the World Health Organization (WHO) Department of Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health and Ageing (MNCAH). He is a member of the WHO Strategic and Technical Advisory Group of Experts (STAGE) Committee on MNCAH and Nutrition; Chair of the WHO Guidelines Development Group (GDG) on Care of the Preterm or Low Birth Weight Infant; the lead of the Steering Committee for The Lancet Series on Gender Equality, Norms and Health; and a Commissioner on The Lancet Commission on Gender and Global Health, and on the Elsevier/Lancet Inclusion and Diversity Advisory Board. He is also Chair of the Coalition of Centres in Global Child Health.
Dr Hani Salim is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at University Putra Malaysia and a Deputy Editor of the journal Malaysian Family Physician. She is a family physician delivering guideline-recommended care for patients with non-communicable diseases. Hani manages chronic respiratory diseases, such as asthma and COPD, focusing on asthma self-management among people with low health literacy. She explores participant-led research such as Photovoice and uses methods that involve stakeholders in the early stages of research.
Professor Sanjay Juvekar is Professor and Head of the Vadu Rural Health Program in India. He is an Anthropologist with holistic approach, encouraging relevant ethical community health research. Vadu Rural Health Program manages the 30 bedded hospital providing health care services, as well as the Health and Demographic Surveillance System (HDSS) covering more than 150,000 people in 22 villages. His large team conducts epidemiological research, social science, disease burden studies, vaccine trials and other clinical trials, behavioral interventions, implementation science and microbiome studies. His vision of a network of HDSS sites across India has helped establish many HDSS sites in the country. His data sharing initiatives (www.INDEPTH-iSHARE.org) have benefitted hundreds of researchers, research sites and research networks worldwide
Dr Sachiyo Yoshida joined the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2007. She works in the area of newborn health research. She is an epidemiologist and her work is focused on research studies aiming to improve newborn survival, growth and development in low- and middle-income countries. She obtained her PhD from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2019. Her research focused on the evaluation of the implementation of the CHNRI research prioritization methodology.
After a brief, unfulfilling stint as a secondary school maths teacher, Professor Simon Cousens trained as a statistician and joined the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 1985, working there until his retirement in 2021. During his time at LSHTM Simon worked on a variety of different health conditions ranging from onchocerciasis in Nigeria to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in the UK. However, the major focus of his work throughout has been on child and neonatal health in low income settings, through which he became involved in the evaluation of the CHNRI method for setting research priorities.
Dr Bassey Ebenso works at the Nuffield Centre for International Health and Development at the University of Leeds. He is an interdisciplinary researcher and lecturer committed to global health and to health systems strengthening in low- and middle-income countries. He has more than 30 years of working experience within African and Asian health systems. His research interests include urban healthcare, digital health technology, maternal and child health, capacity strengthening of health workforce, stigmatization of chronic conditions, and non-communicable diseases.
Ms Peige Song is a “100-Talent” Researcher/Assistant Professor at Zhejiang University, where she leads a “China Burden of Disease (CBD)” group that applies global health metrics in a national setting, with an ambition to estimate top-ranking diseases in Chinese populations, particularly in children. Dr Song obtained her PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2018 and she has a strong background in global health metrics, as well as maternal and child health. She is a core member of the Global Health Epidemiology Research Group (GHERG), a member of the International Society of Global Health, and an Editorial Board member of the Journal of Global Health.
Mr Ozren Polasek is a medical doctor and a public health scientist. He is the Director of the Croatian Centre for Global Health at the University of Split, Croatia. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Global Health Economics and Policy and co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Global Health Reports. He obtained PhDs from the both University of Zagreb (in epidemiology and public health) and the University of Edinburgh (in genetics). He won multiple awards for his research and was awarded the status of the “Highly Cited Researcher” by Clarivate Analytics. He is involved both in genetic epidemiology research and in global health research, where he advised the World Health Organization on the development of the AMANHI biobank in low-resource settings.
Ms Kerri Wazny is currently an Evidence, Measurement, and Evaluation Manager at the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF). Prior, Kerri was the Associate Director of Monitoring and Evaluation at The Power of Nutrition. She has experience on a diversity of topics ranging from maternal, newborn, child health and nutrition, child disability and inclusion, education and has worked in academic, consultant, and NGO settings. For her doctorate, Kerri explored innovative methods to collect and analyse data in global health, such as participatory epidemiology and crowdsourcing at the University of Edinburgh. Kerri is on the Editorial Board of Nutrition Reviews and the Steering Committee of the Standing Together for Nutrition Consortium. She is a leading expert in the Child Health and Nutrition Research Initiative’s (CHNRI) method for research prioritisation. Kerri holds an honorary associate position at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Public Health and an Associate of the Royal Society of Medicine.
Ms Xin Wang is an epidemiologist, working on the epidemiology of respiratory viral infectious diseases (e.g. influenza, RSV, metapneumovirus and parainfluenza virus, SARS-COV-2), the sequelae of early-life respiratory viral infection (e.g. RSV), and global burden estimation of respiratory viral infectious diseases in children and adolescents. She completed her PhD and worked as a research fellow at the University of Edinburgh during 2016-2021. She is currently an associate professor at the School of Public Health, Nanjing Medical University, China.
Dr Siti Nurkamilla Binti Ramdzan is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Primary Care Medicine, at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Malaysia. She received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh, UK, within the NIHR RESPIRE Global Health Unit’s research programme. She conducts qualitative research that explores the context and evaluates self-management interventions for asthma among primary school children, as well as conducts research in primary health care, focused on maternal and child health issues.
Dr Mohammod Jobayer Chisti is Clinical Lead working in Intensive Care Unit of the Dhaka Hospital in Bangladesh and Senior Scientist at the Nutrition and Clinical Services Division (NCSD) at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B). He has a PhD from the University of Melbourne in Australia. He is a paediatric intensivist and paediatric respiratory physician. His clinical research focuses on serious paediatric illness, such as childhood sepsis, ARI, tuberculosis, malnutrition, sclerema, hypoxaemia, diarrhoea (shigellosis, cholera), enteric fever, hypernatraemia, and meningococcaemia. He takes routine clinical care of critically ill children with severe infections at the Dhaka Hospital of ICDDR,B, and other community and district level hospitals in Bangladesh. He aims to mitigate the dismal conditions among those who are often refrained from adequate health facilities.
Dr Anton Glasnović is a neurology consultant with many years of experience in the hospital setting. He also works as a psychoanalyst and is a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association. He is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Histology and Embryology of the University Medical School in Zagreb. He was a deputy Editor-in-Chief of the Croatian Medical Journal and is now Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Global Health Neurology and Psychiatry. He is a regular member of the Croatian Medical Chamber and the Irish Medical Council. His research interest includes neuroinflammation in cerebrovascular and demyelinating diseases. He plays jazz guitar semi-professionally. He released one album in a trio formation, organized an international jazz festival in his hometown of Đakovo, Croatia, and hosted a jazz radio show.
Professor Díaz-Castro is a psychiatrist and researcher at the National Institute of Psychiatry Ramon de la Fuente Muñiz, Mexico. She has a Ph.D. in Public Health Sciences from the National Institute of Public Health, Mexico, focused on healthcare systems. She advanced her skills at the Graduate Institute Geneva. Prof Díaz-Castro is a member of the National System of Researchers, Mexico. She was a professor of postgraduate psychiatry at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and she is currently a professor of the Master in Public Health at the Military School of Health Graduates, of the Secretariat of National Defence. She has more than 15 years of clinical experience in psychiatry at the Psychiatric Hospital Fray Bernardino Alvarez, Ministry of Health, Mexico, being co-author and researcher of international studies on mental disorders, where she also served as Chief of hospitalization and emergency services, and Assistant Director. She led the Governance research project during the COVID-19 pandemic, a project funded by the National Council of Science and Technology.
