Alexander "Sandy" Messent Cairncross OBE (born 8 March 1948) 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.
Sandy Cairncross is a member of the notable Cairncross family which originates in Lanarkshire. He was born to Mary Frances (née Glynn) and the economist, Sir Alexander Kirkland Cairncross. His sister is academic and journalist Frances Cairncross.[ citation needed ] His uncle, John Cairncross was an intelligence officer, spy and double agent. [1]
Cairncross was educated at King's College School, Wimbledon, and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he graduated with honours in mechanical sciences (engineering) in 1969. [2] He subsequently received a PhD in soil mechanics from the University of Cambridge.
He is a public health engineer by profession and an epidemiologist by vocation. Most of his career has been spent in research and teaching, and about a third in developing countries implementing water, sanitation and public health programmes. His experience includes building water supplies in Lesotho, and seven years as a water and sanitation engineer for the Government of Mozambique, shortly after that country's independence.
Sandy is Research Director of the DFID-funded SHARE Research Consortium, whose aim is applied research on sanitation & hygiene, with partners WaterAid, Shack Dwellers International, the International Institute for Environment and Development, and the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh. [3]
He is also Deputy Director of the African SNOWS Consortium to build research capacity of six African universities in water, sanitation & environmental health. [3]
Cairncross was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2011 Birthday Honours for services to environmental health overseas. [4]
In January 2014, Cairncross was awarded the Edwin Chadwick Medal in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the advancement of public health. [3]
Until 2015, he served as chair of trustees to Teaching-aids at Low Cost (TALC), an international non government organization with charitable status based in Hertfordshire. He is also Chair of Africa AHEAD.
He has worked on or contributed to a number of books, including a textbook on environmental health engineering in the tropics. [3]
Brevet Colonel Sir Samuel Rickard Christophers was a British protozoologist and medical entomologist specialising in mosquitoes.
The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) is a public research university in Bloomsbury, central London, and a member institution of the University of London that specialises in public health and tropical medicine. The institution was founded in 1899 by Sir Patrick Manson, after a donation from the Indian Parsi philanthropist B. D. Petit.
Sir Peter Karel, Baron Piot is a Belgian-British microbiologist known for his research into Ebola and AIDS.
Max Joseph Pettenkofer, ennobled in 1883 as Max Joseph von Pettenkofer was a Bavarian chemist and hygienist. He is known for his work in practical hygiene, as an apostle of good water, fresh air and proper sewage disposal. He was further known as an anti-contagionist, a school of thought, named later on, that did not believe in the then novel concept that bacteria were the main cause of disease. In particular he argued in favor of a variety of conditions collectively contributing to the incidence of disease including: personal state of health, the fermentation of environmental ground water, and also the germ in question. He was most well known for his establishment of hygiene as an experimental science and also was a strong proponent for the founding of hygiene institutes in Germany. His work served as an example which other institutes around the world emulated.
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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 2024, he has been the Paul Farmer Professor and Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, where he was previously the Pershing Square Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine. 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.
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