Postgraduate

MSc and Postgraduate Diploma in Infectious Diseases

The Department of Infectious & Tropical Diseases (ITD) encompasses all of the laboratory-based research in the School as well as that on the clinical and epidemiological aspects of infectious and tropical diseases. The range of disciplines represented in the Department is very broad and interdisciplinary research is a feature of much of its activity. The spectrum of diseases studied is wide and there are major research groups focused on malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases, vaccine development and evaluation, and vector biology and disease control.

Professor Martin Taylor
BSc MSc PhD DSc
Professor of Medical Helminthology, and Director of the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Research and Training in Schistosomiasis at LSHTM, Martin Taylor read Zoology at Bristol University. After working for Voluntary Service Overseas in Tanzania, he studied for his PhD in Medical Parasitology at LSHTM and a Masters degree in Immunology at Brunel University, London. Martin's PhD research on schistosomiasis and subsequently its immunology, led to long-term collaborative research beginning in 1974 with colleagues in Sudan. This resulted in the first field trial of a vaccine for schistosomiasis in cattle. In 1988 a parallel programme began with Chinese scientists, with support from the EC. Martin's current research with colleagues in Europe and China aims to develop vaccines for use against human and animal schistosomiasis, and to define protective cellular and humoral immune mechanisms in villagers living in endemic areas. He is a Visiting Professor at Nanging Medical University and has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Science from the University of Khartoum.

Professor Betty Kirkwood
MA MSc HonMFPHM
Betty Kirkwood is an epidemiologist with a statistical background. She joined the School in 1979. In 1988 she set up the Maternal and Child Epidemiology Unit and in 2001 the Public Health Intervention Research Unit. Betty contributes to a range of in house MSc courses including epidemiology, statistics with computing, study design, public health lecture series, and current issues in safe motherhood and perinatal health, and to the advanced statistical methods in epidemiology unit of the distance learning programme. She is tutor to the MSc Public Health in Developing Countries. Betty enjoys teaching and believes in a student-centred, problem-based approach. She is committed to making complex methodological concepts accessible to non-specialists (and has written one of the core unit textbooks, Essentials of Medical Statistics, which is used as a standard text in many institutions in Europe as well as at the School).

Betty's main interests are in: strategies to improve children's vitamin A status; vitamin A supplementation and maternal mortality; interventions to enhance child health through improving health provider performance and/or appropriate care-seeking behaviour; IMCI (integrated management of childhood illnesses); neonatal health; issues in the evaluation of community-based interventions; methodological issues in the design and analysis of epidemiological studies in developing countries; integration of anthropological and epidemiological approaches in field studies. Much of her research is conducted in partnership with the Kintampo Health Research Centre, Ghana Health Services, and she also has close collaborative links with Brazil, Mexico, Peru, India and the Department of Child and Adolescent Health and Development at the World Health Organization.

Anne Tholen
BSc RGN MSc
Anne Tholen graduated in Mathematics at Exeter University and qualified as a nurse at St Thomas' Hospital, London. She subsequently joined St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College, where she managed the first UK antenatal serum screening service for Down's syndrome, also organising international training courses for health professionals in this field. In 1998, she obtained an MSc in Epidemiology at Erasmus University, Rotterdam (The Netherlands). She joined LSHTM in 1999. Her research interests include psychosocial aspects of antenatal screening, ultrasound screening for congenital abnormalities and maternal epilepsy.

Professor John Ackers
MA MSc DPhil
John Ackers is Professor of Postgraduate Education in Public Health at LSHTM. He graduated from Oxford with a BA in Chemistry and a DPhil in Glycoprotein Chemistry. John worked first on improving whooping-cough vaccines at the Lister Institute and subsequently on the immunological diagnosis of Trichomonas vaginalis at the School. His research interests are concentrated on Entamoeba histolytica, but he still retains great affection for T.vaginalis, which is becoming both common and important in many parts of the world.