Dennis Mazingi is a medical doctor and general surgeon with a special interest in paediatric injury prevention, global surgery, and surgically correctable NCDs. He has worked in clinical medicine and surgery in southern Africa for almost a decade and is currently pursuing a DPhil in the University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences in the global surgery group.

His work focuses on trauma surveillance and quality improvement in paediatric trauma care in Zimbabwe. He is ably supervised by Professor Kokila Lakhoo and Professor Ashok Handa at the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences and Professor Godfrey Muguti at the University of Zimbabwe.

Prior to joining The George Institute Dennis obtained his undergraduate medical degree at the University of Malawi, College of Medicine and an MMed (Master’s in Medicine) in General Surgery at the University of Zimbabwe, College of Health Sciences. He holds a first-class degree in International Health and Tropical Medicine (IHTM) from the University of Oxford and is a fellow of the College of Surgeons of South Africa as well as a Beit Trust Scholar.

He has worked in various research collaboratives in the field of global surgery, paediatric surgery, and general surgery. Dennis’s other interests lie in clinical surgery, surgical education, disruptive health technologies, frugal innovations, health systems and implementation research.

Dennis wants to see a healthier, more prosperous, more equitable world through surgical care and research. His mission is to help accelerate progress towards SDG target 3.6: to halve the number of deaths and injuries from road traffic accidents by 2030 in Zimbabwe and globally; and to scale up quality surgical and anaesthesia care to the 5 billion people who need it through 2030 and beyond.

Professor Simone Pettigrew is the Head of Food Policy. She has qualifications in Economics, Marketing, and Consumer Psychology. Her broad areas of expertise include behavioural psychology, health promotion, health policy, communications, social marketing, and intervention research.

Along with nutrition, her substantive areas of research include obesity, physical activity, alcohol consumption, smoking, active transport, and healthy ageing. Simone sits on numerous advisory committees and regularly performs research consultancies for NGO and government entities. To date, she has published more than 400 peer-reviewed papers and produced more than 160 technical reports for NGOs and government departments.

See Professor Pettigrew's full CV here.

Devaki Nambiar is Program Director, Healthier Societies Strategy at the George Institute for Global Health India with appointments at the Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India, the University of New South Wales, Australia, and the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, USA.

She is a Health Policy and Systems Researcher (HPSRer) with over two decades of experience working in India and other Low- and Middle-Income Countries on decision-maker demand-driven research, postgraduate teaching in HPSR, as well as technical assistance with an emphasis on community action for health, social exclusion, health equity and health for all. She is a former Fulbright, Fogarty, and NIH scholar, and Fellow of the Wellcome Trust/Department of Biotechnology India Alliance. She advises the WHO on health inequality monitoring, national programme re-orientation, and guideline development to leave no one behind.

She serves on the Lancet-Chatham House Commission on Improving Population Health post COVID-19, the Lancet Commission on Sustainable Healthcare, and advises Lancet Commissions on Women and Cancer as well as on Reimagining India's Health System. She is a member of the People's Health Movement and the Medico Friends Circle. She also serves on the Board of Health Systems Global and the Research Advisory Board of the Institute of Public Health, Bengaluru, India. Dr. Nambiar received her doctorate in public health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2009 and is a recipient of an Emerging Leader Award from the Royal Society for Tropical Medicine & Hygiene.

Dr. Soumyadeep Bhaumik is a medical doctor and international public health research methodologist striving to harness the power of science to drive just transformation for healthier individuals, communities, and nations.

As the Head of the Meta-research and Evidence Synthesis Unit at The George Institute for Global Health, he oversees an agile global team of researchers, specialising in using fit-for-purpose approaches for synthesising evidence to inform policies, practices, and guidelines. He is recognised internationally for his work on evidence synthesis, particularly research priority setting and core outcome sets -- both its conduct and methodological aspects. He also works on the moral and epistemological aspects of meta-research in health and medicine with the intent to transform the evidence ecosystem from justice-blind to pro-justice. Soumyadeep also conducts interpretive policy analysis to understand the societal construction and framing of public health problems. As a methodologist, he works in a disease-agnostic manner, although recent work has had a focus on snakebite.

Soumyadeep' s work has impacted the way research is conducted --through the Cochrane Handbook Chapter, which provides guidance on framing the scope of systematic reviews, development of reporting guidelines for research, and through methodological research. His work routinely influences guidelines, and policies of governments and multi-laterals. They have consistently been listed as one of the top 2% lifetime cited researchers (Stanford University analysis in General & Internal Medicine and Public Health field) since 2021.

Jagnoor is Senior Research Fellow, with a background in injury epidemiology. She has a conjoint appointment as Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Medicine, UNSW and an honorary Senior Lecturer appointment, School of Public Health University of Sydney, and The John Walsh Centre for Rehabilitation Research.

Jagnoor’ s research interests are exploring the impact of injuries, assessing issues of equity and vulnerability in the distribution of the burden of injuries, evaluating potential interventions to reduce the burden of injuries in Australia, Africa and Asia and contributing to data for decision making in preventing injuries and improving recovery post-injury.

Her current research spans a broad range, including injury prevention, rehabilitation, health-related quality of life, economic impact and alternate systems of insurance with respect to injury, whiplash, and mild traumatic brain injury. She is passionate about creating new knowledge to best address the injury burden in low middle-income populations with competing for health needs. She is engaged in several projects in LMIC working on injury surveillance systems, road injuries, burns, falls and drowning.

Professor Neal is a UK-trained physician who has 25 years’ experience in clinical, epidemiological, and public health research with a focus on heart disease, stroke and diabetes. 

He has a longstanding interest in high blood pressure and diabetes and the potential for both clinical interventions and changes in the food supply to deliver health gains.  His work has been characterised by its focus on collaboration, quantitation, translation and impact.  

He holds professorial appointments at UNSW Sydney, Imperial College London, and an honorary appointment at the University of Sydney.  He has published some 450 scientific papers and since 2016 has been identified by Thomson Reuters as one of ‘The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds’ - an acknowledgement bestowed on just a few thousand researchers across all disciplines worldwide.  

He has deep expertise in the conduct of large-scale clinical trials addressing cardiovascular disease but has also done a significant body of work addressing food policy issues related to sugars, fats, portion size and food labelling.

Margie's work focuses on how to prevent unintentional injuries, particularly in resource-strapped countries.

While road injuries are the biggest issue, Margie's work also canvases other significant problems of drowning, burns and falls, and identifies interventions that could save lives. Her research looks at what works, specifically in developing countries. It will provide evidence on how to prevent injuries before they happen. But it will also hope to look at the post-crash phase, working with nurses – who are the mainstay of healthcare provision in developing countries – to provide optimum treatment management. In some developing countries, traumatic injuries account for up to 70%-80% of the caseloads in emergency rooms. If you can stop these injuries upstream, there are enormous gains for healthcare systems, both financially and in terms of workforce needs.

Representing The George Institute for Global Health and South Africa, Margie is a member of the Commonwealth Road Safety Initiative Expert Panel and together with colleagues from Kenya and Canada leads the data analysis for the reports being developed ahead of the 3rd Ministerial level meeting in Sweden in February 2020 and the CHOG meeting in Rwanda. She is also a member of the Academic Expert Group for this Ministerial meeting, a group responsible for making an independent and scientific assessment of the progress made during the Decade of Action for Road Safety. This report is now available here. The Academic Expert Group will also recommend a road safety strategy for the period 2020-2030. Margie is also Chair of the Global Advisory Board for the Malawi Road Safety Research and Implementation Unit at the University of Malawi.

Prior to working at The George Institute, she was a nurse and an epidemiologist. She worked in a hospital in Cape Town, South Africa for many years before moving to the National Trauma Research Programme at the South African Medical Research Council. After that she was at the World Health Organization for 17 years, coordinating the Unintentional Injury Prevention unit. 

Emma Feeny is Global Director of Impact & Engagement at The George Institute for Global Health, where she leads a programme of activities including advocacy, policy engagement and thought leadership to help increase the impact of the institute’s health and medical research.

Emma is a Senior Visiting Fellow at United Nations University International Institute for Global Health (UNU-IIGH), and co-chairs the NCD Lab on Women and Girls with the World Health Organization. She also co-chairs the NCD Alliance Supporters’ Group, and is a former co-chair of the Taskforce on Women and NCDs.

Before joining The George Institute in 2017, Emma worked as a global policy and advocacy advisor at Oxfam, and held policy and communications roles at the University of Oxford, the World Food Programme and elsewhere. A former journalist, she has an MA in the Social Anthropology of Development from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

Julie Brown heads the Injury program at the George Institute for Global Health, Australia, is Co-Director of the Transurban Road Safety Centre at NeuRA, and  Professor, School of Population Health, UNSW. She works across the continuum of the public health model from defining problems, identifying risk and protective factors, developing and testing interventions to monitoring and evaluating the implementation of interventions designed to reduce the burden of injury, and has demonstrated expertise in multi-disciplinary research methods. Her career vision is to reduce the health burden attributable to injury by delivering tangible ways to prevent road crash-related injury and unintentional injury more broadly. Prior to completing her PhD at UNSW in 2008, she worked for >20 years in vehicle and equipment safety research and policy development for the NSW government. Insight into research needs for regulatory and policy development from this experience continues to frame her research.