Dr Muhammed Afolabi is a Global Health scientist and an Associate Professor of Global Public Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, United Kingdom. He obtained a medical degree from the University of Ibadan in 1999; a master’s degree in Public Health from Obafemi Awolowo University in 2007, and a PhD from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, UK in 2015. He underwent specialist training that led to the award of the postgraduate fellowships of the West African College of Physicians and National Postgraduate Medical College of Nigeria in the Faculty of Family Medicine. He is also a Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health of the Royal Colleges of Physicians of the UK and a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. 

Dr Afolabi is currently working on a prestigious UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) fellowship (grant value: £2.25 million) that focuses on investigating the feasibility, safety, effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of integrating the vertical control programmes for malaria and neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) among a high-risk paediatric population in West Africa. This adventurous project will hopefully lead to the implementation of an increasingly recognised WHO strategy of a paradigm shift from parallel, top-down disease control programmes to integrated, locally relevant, evidence-based, and sustainable child health policies and their delivery. 

As a member of the IDDO Data Access Committee on Schistosomiasis, Dr Afolabi will deploy his expertise on the intersections between malaria and NTDs to critically evaluate datasets to achieve the IDDO’s goals of data sharing to maximise resources, prioritise research, leverage existing knowledge and accelerate outputs.