Dr Jamie Rylance

Jamie is a consultant physician in Respiratory and General Internal Medicine. He has recently taken up a Wellcome Trust Clinical Fellow position on a project investigating the causes of harm from intravenous fluids in sepsis in Africa. He has a longstanding interest in acute care and infection in Low Income Countries. For two years he has worked in Tanzania as a Medical Officer with VSO. This work focussed on health service development, particularly on the quality of medical care given to critically unwell patients. His PhD was funded through the Wellcome Trust, and undertaken in Malawi. Jamie is returning to Malawi to take up the new fellowship addressing the question: “how can we direct fluid therapy to those who stand to benefit from it, and away from those to whom fluids are likely to be detrimental?” The work will recruit patients with suspected infection and cardiovascular instability: they will be intensively monitored to identify changes in their macrovascular and microvascular perfusion and outcomes during and after initial fluid resuscitation.

Jamie also co-directs the African Research Collaboration on Sepsis which investigates acute care for those with severe infection in Uganda, Malawi and Gabon. Experience of a semi-rural hospital has been massively influential: giving high quality care is partly resource dependent, but improvement must also be driven through a supportive and self-critical working environment. ARCS is exciting, as it has the potential to improve both local resources and training.

Click to see Jamie's ORCiD profile.

Email: jamie.rylance@lstmed.ac.uk

Dr Kondwani Jambo

Kondwani is a pulmonary immunologist with a particular interest in immune defence against pathogens in the lung. During his Fellowship, he aims to understand what promotes persistence of HIV in the lung after initiation of antiretroviral therapy. Persistence of HIV in the lung, especially in alveolar macrophages, presents an enormous challenge for the eradication of HIV in the human host. Kondwani’s research will mainly focus on investigating whether HIV suppresses host-immune functions that are key for recognition and clearance of HIV-infected cells in the lung. Understanding the mechanisms that promote persistence of HIV in the lung will help in the formulation of novel therapeutic strategies against HIV.

Click to see Kondwani's publications in our database.

Email: kondwani.jambo@lstmed.ac.uk

Dr Tom Fletcher, Research Training Fellow

Dr Tom Fletcher is a Wellcome Trust/MoD Research Training Fellow and an Infectious Diseases Speciality Registrar in Liverpool. He is a physician in the Defence Medical Services and his research at LSTM is investigating the pathogenesis of Crimean-Congo Haemorrhagic Fever (CCHF). For his PhD he is examining theinteraction of immune response, viral load and clinical course in a cohort of patients with CCHF in Turkey, and undertaking his laboratory work at PHE Porton. He is specifically interested in viral haemorrhagic fevers and during a recent secondment with the World Health Organisation HQ, deployed several times as a clinician to Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

Click to see Tom's publications in our database.

Email: tomfletcher@doctors.org.uk

Dr Catriona Waitt, Clinical Postdoctoral Fellow

Catriona is a Wellcome Trust Clinical Postdoctoral Fellow investigating antiretroviral pharmacokinetics in mother-infant pairs at the Infectious Diseases Institute, Makerere University, Uganda. She is a Senior Lecturer in Clinical Pharmacology at the University of Liverpool with a focus on infection pharmacology in low-resource settings. Her PhD explored early mortality in Malawian adults treated for pulmonary tuberculosis (a Wellcome Trust Training Fellowship based at MLW), and her current fellowship builds on her existing skills, incorporating LC-MS/MS assay development, pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic modelling and clinical trials.

Click to see Catriona's publications in our database.

Email: cwaitt@liverpool.ac.uk

Augustine Choko, Wellcome Trust Public Health & Tropical Medicine Training Fellow

Augustine is a statistical epidemiologist with a special interest in statistical methods and public health trials. His Fellowship aims to develop the statistical methodology to allow adaptive-trial concepts to be applied to clustered units of randomisation (cluster-randomised trials). He then aims to apply these new methodologies in a Phase-2 trial (http://www.isrctn.com/ISRCTN18421340) comparing multiple different approaches (low-to-high fixed financial incentives, lottery prize draws, home-visits, etc.) aimed at encouraging male partners of pregnant women to test for HIV and subsequently link into HIV care or prevention (voluntary male medical circumcision). The study will recruit women at the time of registration for antenatal care in Blantyre, Malawi, and will deliver HIV self-testing kits to men via their pregnant partner.  Adaptive trial designs can provide timely and efficient comparison of multiple interventions in a single study: and so may have special value in public health, where there are often many potential candidate interventions with relatively little to inform the choice between them.

Click to see Augustine's publications in our database.

Email: augutc@gmail.com

Dr Joseph Kamtchum, Wellcome Trust Public Health & Tropical Medicine Masters Fellow

Joseph is a neurologist interested in studying interactions between HIV infection and cerebrovascular diseases in order to inform prevention and treatment policies in sub-Saharan Africa. His Fellowship is divided into two parts: an initial 12-month training period for a Master’s of Research in Clinical Sciences at the University of Liverpool, followed by an 18-month clinical project in Malawi. He will use ELISA to measure and compare plasma levels of biomarkers of endothelial dysfunction in a cohort of HIV-negative and HIV-positive stroke patients (with or without antiretroviral therapy). He will also perform survival analysis to identify predictors of stroke recurrence.

Email: kamtchum@liverpool.ac.uk

Dr Simon Graham, Wellcome Trust Public Health & Tropical Medicine Masters Fellow

Simon is a specialist trainee in Orthopaedic and Trauma Surgery within the Mersey Deanery. He undertook his undergraduate training at the University of Leeds (MBChB), where he also completed a postgraduate Research Masters in Mechanical Engineering. He has previously worked as an Orthopaedic Trauma and Research Fellow at Queens Elizabeth Central Hospital, Malawi. His PhD is based in Cape Town, South Africa and will investigate the effect of HIV on fracture healing in trauma patients. 

Email: simon.graham@lstmed.ac.uk

Dr Peter MacPherson, Wellcome Career Development Clinical Research Fellow

Dr Peter MacPherson is a Wellcome Career Development Clinical Research Fellow and public health physician. His research focuses on the epidemiology of  the HIV and TB co-epidemics in sub-Saharan Africa, and on the development and evaluation of interventions to improve case detection and access to treatment. During his present Wellcome Fellowship, Peter will be based at the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme in Blantyre, where he will undertake a pragmatic randomised controlled trial of optimised HIV/TB screening using novel diagnostics and linkage to care among adults attending health centres with symptoms of tuberculosis. During his Wellcome Clinical PhD, Peter did a cluster-randomised trial of a novel HIV self-testing and home initiation of treatment intervention among 17,000 adults in urban communities in Malawi. Peter is an Honorary Consultant in Communicable Disease Control with Public Health England.

Click to see Peter's publications in our database.

Email: peter.macpherson@lstmed.ac.uk

Dr Khuzwayo Jere, Wellcome Trust Public Health & Tropical Medicine Training Fellow

Dr Khuzwayo Jere is a Wellcome Trust Training Fellow, a Lecturer at the College of Medicine (University of Malawi), an Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute of Infection and Global Health (University of Liverpool) and a Research Affiliate at the Institute of Infection, Immunity & Inflammation (University of Glasgow). He obtained a BSc degree at the University of Malawi before joining the Malawi-Liverpool Wellcome Trust (MLW) as a Graduate Research Scientist. He was awarded a MLW Training Scholarship to pursue a BSc (Hon) in Medical Virology at the Medical University of Southern Africa (Medunsa) in South Africa where he also completed a Masters degree in Medical Virology, and a PhD in Biochemistry (North-West University). He then worked as a Postdoctoral Scientist at Medunsa and University of Liverpool for 4 years. He has now been awarded a Wellcome Training Fellowship in Public Health and Tropical Medicine to understand immune responses in Malawian children immunised with rotavirus vaccine through high throughput immunoglobulin repertoire sequencing. He aspires to further contribute towards solving pressing health problems affecting the sub-Saharan region through application of cutting-edge technologies, training young scientists and leading a vibrant virus research team based in Africa.

Email: kcjere@medcol.mw