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Our Team
Our diverse, passionate researchers are united by a common goal: protecting mothers and babies in a warming world.
Till Bärnighausen
Till Bärnighausen is Director of the Heidelberg Institute of Global Health (HIGH) and Alexander von Humboldt Professor at Heidelberg University.
He is Senior Faculty at the Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI) in South Africa (one of the five Global Programmes of the British Wellcome Trust) and Adjunct Professor of Global Health in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health of Harvard University.
His research focuses on identifying, designing and testing novel interventions to boost population health, addressing prevention and treatment needs for major diseases (such as HIV, diabetes, hypertension and depression) and address major health risks (such as obesity and extreme heat).
Caroline Homer
Professor Caroline Homer AO is the Deputy Director (Gender Equity, Diversity and Inclusion) and Co-head of the Global Women’s and Newborns Health Group at the Burnet Institute. She holds honorary professorial positions at the University of Technology Sydney, University of Melbourne and Monash and Deakin Universities.
Caroline has led research and development in maternal and newborn health for more than 20 years in Australia and across the Asia-Pacific region. She is particularly interested in the role of midwives and the potential impact of strengthening midwifery. She works closely with many small island nations in the South Pacific Ocean, all whom are impacted by climate change.
She is currently the Chair of the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council and the Deputy Chair for the Australian Medical Research Advisory Committee for the Medical Research Future Fund.
She is also the Chair of the World Health Organization’s Strategic and Technical Advisory Group of Experts (STAGE) for Maternal, Newborn, Child, Adolescent Health, and Nutrition.
Anthony Costello
Anthony Costello is the former Professor of International Child Health & Director at the Institute for Global Health of the University College London and former Director of maternal, child and adolescent health, World Health Organization in Geneva.
Most notable for his work on improving survival among mothers and their newborn infants in poor populations of developing countries.
Anthony Costello chaired the 2009 Lancet Commission on Managing the Health Effects of Climate Change, co-chaired the Lancet Commission which links the UK, China, Norway and Sweden on emergency actions to tackle the climate health crisis, published in June 2015, and he also led the development of the Lancet Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change in 2015.
Vlatka Matkovic
Vlatka Matkovic, PhD in Biomedicine and health sciences. She is a public health promoter for over 20 years. She is managing EU projects in respiratory health in Lungs Europe.
Lungs Europe is a Brussels-based collaboration between the European Lung Foundation (ELF) and the European Respiratory Society (ERS). Lungs Europe works in the respiratory field to drive policy and the regulatory environment in support of lung health at the European level.
There, she is focusing on smoothly running EU-funded projects on respiratory diseases, looking at unmet medical and societal needs in the respiratory field, in close collaboration with patients and respiratory doctors ELF and ERS. She is part of European Public Health Association (EUPHA), leading Environmental health Section.
Mickey Chopra
Mickey Chopra is the Global Solutions Lead for Service Delivery at the Health , Nutrition and Population global practice of the World Bank. In this position, he focuses on organization, management, and quality of health services.
He is the previous Chief of Health and Associate Director of Programs at UNICEF’s New York Headquarters.
Linda Nyondo-Mipando
Linda Nyondo-Mipando is Registered Nurse Midwife and an Associate Professor of Health Systems and Policy at Kamuzu University of Health Sciences in Malawi. She is a tenure track fellow at the University of Liverpool.
She is keen on redesigning health services with end-users, health care workers, and policy makers to ensure optimal delivery of health services. Her areas of interest are HIV and AIDS across different populations, Malaria, and Maternal and Newborn Health.
Mark New
Prof. Mark New was the previous Director of the African Climate and Development Initiative (2011 – 2023) and a Professor in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Science, both at the University of Cape Town.
In 2023, Mark received the Frontiers Planet Prize, which awards research that contributes towards solutions to planetary environmental problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and water overuse. He has also been awarded the for Piers Sellers Prize for world leading contributions to solution-focused climate research, has twice been named in Apolitical’s list of the 100 most influential people in climate policy, and is the leading African scientist on the Reuters “Hot List” of influential climate scientists.
Mark has over twenty-five years’ experience in climate change research, teaching and project management. His research has encompassed detection of climate change trends, climate modelling and scenarios, assessment of uncertainty in climate projections and impacts, attribution of climate change impacts, and climate change adaptation.
Jantina de Vries
Jantina de Vries is founding and current director of the Ethics Lab and Professor of Medicine at the University of Cape Town. The Ethics Lab cultivates convivial scholarship for a more just world and fosters transformative ethics scholarship that centres Africa as the context and driver for global health ethics. She leads two core grants that support that work: a Wellcome Trust Research Development Programme that seeks to articulate how knowledge from the African humanities could and should inform on the ethics of new and emerging health technologies; and a Fogarty International Centre (NIH) award that aims to develop and implement an MSc in Global Health Ethics degree that centres Africa as the context and driver for ethics. She is also a co-investigator on a Wellcome Trust Discovery Award (PI Caesar Atuire) that focuses on developing a global health solidarity index for global health funders.
Jantina’s primary expertise is in the ethics of African genomics research. She was a member of the WHO Genome Editing Expert Advisory Committee, a member of the H3Africa Steering Committee and the founding Chair of the H3Africa Working Group on Ethics. She led the development of many ethics guidelines for genomics research that are used across the African continent. She is a member of the Ethics Board of Médecins Sans Frontières and the Steering Committee of the Global Forum for Bioethics in Research.
Jantina obtained her DPhil through The Ethox Centre at the University of Oxford (2011), and an undergraduate degree in sociology at Wageningen University (2003). She has published over 120 articles in international peer reviewed journals.