Prof Joy Lawn
Prof. of Maternal, Reprod. & Child Hlth.
LSHTM
London School Hygiene & Trop Medicine
London
WC1E 7HT
United Kingdom
Joy is a Ugandan-born, British-trained paediatrician/neonatal clinician and perinatal epidemiologist with 30 years’ experience especially in sub-Saharan Africa including: clinical care, measurment and epidemiological burden estimates, implementation/evaluation of maternal, newborn and child health. Her paediatric/neonatal training was in the UK, followed by teaching, implementation and research, mainly living in Africa. Her MPH was from Emory, Atlanta, USA, whilst at CDC, and her PhD at Institute of Child Health, London. For 10 years, she was Director of Evidence and Policy for Saving Newborn Lives/Save the Children. She has been a professor at LSHTM since 2012, and was Director of the MARCH Centre (Maternal Adolescent Reproductive & Child Health) from 2013-2023 seeing growth from 200 to over 500 academics.
Her main contribution to global health has been developing the evidence-base to measure and reduce the global burden of 2.3 million neonatal deaths, 2 million stillbirths, and 13.4 million preterm births, including informing Sustainable Development Goal targets. She has published >370 peer-reviewed papers including leading several influential Lancet series, with wide media and policy uptake. H-index ~120. She is Co-Chair of the Lancet Commission on Implementation and Evidence in Global Health (2023-2025).
She is a champion for equitable and diverse research leadership, and has supervised many PhDs and post-docs. Joy is one of the few women nominated to membership of both UK Academy of Medical Sciences and USA National Academy of Medicine. She has served on many WHO committees, inclduing STAGE, Global Statistics, Group B Step and been part of Every Newborn leaderhsip team since 2014.
Twitter/X @joylawn
Affiliations
Centres
Teaching
MSc teaching includes:
- RHSR (several modules)
- Current issues in Safe Motherhood/perinatal health
- Global Nutrition
- DTM&H
PhDs
~10 successfully completed in the last few years
Currently co supervising several and no scope to take on new phds - sorry
Research
Joy and her team work on multi-country studies regarding newborn health, stillbirths and child development worldwide, including trials and large scale implementation research on small and sick newborn care with NEST360 Alliance, big data partnerships, and UN estimates as well as novel work on Group B Streptococcus with WHO and others.