Peter George Smith (born 3 May 1942) CBE BSc DSc HonMFPHM FMedSci, is an eminent epidemiologist and Professor of Tropical Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).
Peter Smith graduated in mathematics from City University, London and joined the Medical Research Council's Statistical Research Unit in 1965. He went on to work on various aspects of epidemiological and statistical research including: MRC Clinical and Population Cytogenetics Research Unit, Edinburgh (1967–69); Makerere University Medical School, Uganda (1970–71); International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France and Uganda (1971–72); Imperial Cancer Research Fund Cancer Epidemiology Unit, Oxford (1972–79). He joined LSHTM in 1979 to head the Tropical Epidemiology Unit. In 1987 he was placed at the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston and was also involved in the Tropical Diseases Research Programme of WHO in that year. He headed the Department of Epidemiology and Population Sciences at the LSHTM from 1990-96. In 1997 the Department of Infectious and Tropical Diseases was formed at the LSHTM, which he headed until 2002. He is currently Professor of Tropical Epidemiology. [1]
Research interests include large-scale intervention studies against tropical diseases, including vaccine trials. Peter has also been involved in recent years in research on the link between bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease in humans. From 1996 to 2004 he served on the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee, which advises the UK government on BSE and related issues. He was the acting chair of the committee from 1999–2001 and was the chair from August 2001 to July 2004. He also serves on a number of international committees relating to intervention studies against some of the major tropical diseases. [1]
Peter Smith received professional recognition with the presentation of:
He was honoured with:
The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) is a public research university in Bloomsbury, Camden, and a constituent college of the University of London that specialises in public health and tropical medicine.
The Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) is a higher education institution with degree awarding powers and registered charity located in Liverpool, United Kingdom. Established in 1898, it was the first institution in the world dedicated to research and teaching in tropical medicine. The school has a research portfolio of over £220 million, assisted by funding from organisations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust and Department for International Development (DFID).
Alexander "Sandy" Messent Cairncross OBE is an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). He has an interest in environmental interventions for disease control, including both technical issues and policy.
Sir Roy Malcolm Anderson is a leading international authority on the epidemiology and control of infectious diseases. He is the author, with Robert May, of the most highly cited book in this field, entitled Infectious Diseases of Humans: Dynamics and Control. His early work was on the population ecology of infectious agents before focusing on the epidemiology and control of human infections. His published research includes studies of the major viral, bacterial and parasitic infections of humans, wildlife and livestock. This has included major studies on HIV, SARS, foot and mouth disease, bovine tuberculosis, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, influenza A, antibiotic resistant bacteria, the neglected tropical diseases and most recently Covid-19. Anderson is the author of over 650 peer-reviewed scientific articles with an h citation index of 125.
Geoffrey Arthur Rose was an eminent epidemiologist whose ideas have been credited with transforming the approach to strategies for improving health. He was formerly the Emeritus Professor of Epidemiology at the Department of Epidemiology, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad cow disease, is a neurodegenerative disease of cattle. Symptoms include abnormal behavior, trouble walking, and weight loss. Later in the course of the disease the cow becomes unable to function normally. The time between infection and onset of symptoms is generally four to five years. Time from onset of symptoms to death is generally weeks to months. Spread to humans is believed to result in variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (vCJD). As of 2018, a total of 231 cases of vCJD had been reported globally.
Miquel Porta is a Catalan physician, epidemiologist and scholar. He has promoted the integration of biological, clinical and environmental knowledge and methods in health research and teaching, which he has conducted internationally; notably, in Spain, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Harvard, Imperial College London, and several other universities in Europe, North America, Kuwait, and Brazil. Appointed by the International Epidemiological Association (IEA), in 2008 he succeeded the Canadian epidemiologist John M. Last as Editor of "A Dictionary of Epidemiology". In the Preface to this book he argues for an inclusive and integrative practice of the science of epidemiology.
Jeremiah Noah "Jerry" Morris was a Scottish epidemiologist who established the importance of physical activity in preventing cardiovascular disease.
Sheila Macdonald Bird OBE FRSE FMedSci is a Scottish biostatistician whose assessment of misuse of statistics in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and BMJ series ‘Statistics in Question’ led to statistical guidelines for contributors to medical journals. Bird's doctoral work on non-proportional hazards in breast cancer found application in organ transplantation where beneficial matching was the basis for UK's allocation of cadaveric kidneys for a decade. Bird led the Medical Research Council (MRC) Biostatistical Initiative in support of AIDS/HIV studies in Scotland, as part of which Dr A. Graham Bird and she pioneered Willing Anonymous HIV Surveillance (WASH) studies in prisons. Her work with Cooper on UK dietary bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) exposure revealed that the 1940–69 birth cohort was the most exposed and implied age-dependency in susceptibility to clinical vCJD progression from dietary BSE exposure since most vCJD cases were younger, born in 1970–89. Bird also designed the European Union's robust surveillance for transmissible spongiform encephalopathies in sheep which revolutionised the understanding of scrapie.
Paul Whelton is an Irish-born American physician and scientist who has made seminal contributions to hypertension and kidney disease epidemiology. He also mentored numerous public health leaders including the deans of the schools of public health at Johns Hopkins and Columbia. He currently serves as the Show Chwan Health Care System Endowed Chair in Global Public Health and a Clinical Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. He is the founding director of the Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology, and Clinical Research at Johns Hopkins University.
Vikram Harshad Patel FMedSci is an Indian psychiatrist and researcher best known for his work on child development and mental disability in low-resource settings. He is the Co-Founder and former Director of the Centre for Global Mental Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), Co-Director of the Centre for Control of Chronic Conditions at the Public Health Foundation of India, and the Co-Founder of Sangath, an Indian NGO dedicated to research in the areas of child development, adolescent health and mental health. Since 2016 he has been Pershing Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine of Harvard Medical School in Boston. He was awarded a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellowship in 2015. In April 2015, he was listed as one of the world's 100 most influential people by TIME magazine.
John ("Jack") Payne Woodall (1935–2016) was a British/American entomologist and virologist who made significant contributions to the study of arboviruses in South America, the Caribbean and Africa. He did research on the causative agents of dengue fever, Crimean–Congo hemorrhagic fever, o'nyong'nyong fever, yellow fever, Zika fever, and others. He served as a staff member of the Rockefeller Foundation, and director of the Foundation's laboratory in Brazil, as a research fellow at the Yale Arbovirus Research Unit, was head of the Arbovirus Laboratory for the New York State Health Department, and worked for the Centers for Disease Control. Woodall spent 13 years at the World Health Organization developing and evaluating health programs. After retirement in 2007, he continued as a consultant and professor at the Institute of Medical Biochemistry in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he had worked since 1998. In 1994, he cofounded the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases (ProMED-mail). Woodall's emails concluded with a quote from the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, "God put me on this earth to accomplish a certain number of things. Right now I'm so far behind I will never die."
Professor John Owusu Gyapong is a Ghanaian Professor of Epidemiology. He is currently the Vice Chancellor of the University of Health and Allied Sciences, Ho Ghana.
Professor Tumani Corrah is a Gambian clinician whose fields of research include tuberculosis, HIV and malaria. Corrah is Director of the Africa Research Excellence Fund (AREF) and Director, Africa Research Development, Medical Research Council.
Pontiano Kaleebu is a Ugandan physician, clinical immunologist, HIV/AIDS researcher, academic and medical administrator, who is the executive director of the Uganda Virus Research Institute (UVRI).
The United Kingdom was afflicted with an outbreak of Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and its human equivalent variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (vCJD), in the 1980s and 1990s. Over four million head of cattle were slaughtered in an effort to contain the outbreak, and 177 people died after contracting vCJD through eating infected beef. A political and public health crisis resulted, and British beef was banned from export to numerous countries around the world, with some bans remaining in place until as late as 2019.
Hazel Marguerite Dockrell is an Irish-born microbiologist and immunologist whose research has focused on immunity to the human mycobacterial diseases, leprosy and tuberculosis. She has spent most of her career at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where as of 2020 she is a professor of immunology. She was the first female president of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Jimmy Whitworth of the Wellcome Trust describes her as "a marvellous ambassador for global health and research."
Azra Catherine Hilary Ghani is a British epidemiologist who is a professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College London. Her research considers the mathematical modelling of infectious diseases, including malaria, bovine spongiform encephalopathy and coronavirus. She has worked with the World Health Organization on their technical strategy for malaria. She is associate director of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis.
Japhet Killewo is a Tanzanian doctor and epidemiologist in Kagera, Tanzania. He was the former Chair of Tanzanian Public Health Association and currently an epidemiology professor at Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences (MUHAS). His research area focuses on HIV/AIDS epidemiology research in Kagera region in Tanzania. As a clinician, he also focuses on AIDS control and mother-to-child intervention in Tanzania. As a scholar, he publishes actively in international journals and participated in many projects across the globe, which are organised and supported by the European Union, as well as World Bank and USAIDS.
Moses Alobo is a Kenyan physician, public health researcher and social entrepreneur. He leads the African Academy of Sciences Grand Challenges Africa Programme. He specialises in the implementation of health research in resource-limited countries, including programmes in vaccinology and antimicrobial resistance. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Alobo led the African Academy of Sciences' response to coronavirus disease.