Professor Joy Lawn
BMedci MB BS FRCPCH MPH PhD FMedSci
Professor
of Maternal, Reproductive and Child Health, Director of MARCH Center
Joy has lived and worked in many African countries, including as a lecturer and neonatalogist in Ghana in the 1990s. She shifted to public health and global estimation working at the WHO Collaborating Center, CDC Atlanta, USA (1998-2001), and then at the Institute of Child Health, London, UK (2001-2004), completing a Masters of Public Health at Emory University, Atlanta and a PhD in perinatal epidemiology at University College London, UK. For ten years she was been Director Global Evidence and Policy for Gates Foundation funded Saving Newborn Lives (SNL) programme of Save the Children, working with governments and partners to scale up and evaluate newborn care including leadership in the Every Newborn Lancet series and Action Plan.
She has published over 200 peer reviewed papers, as well as a range of chapters, books and policy relevant reports. She co-led several Lancet series on newborn survival and stillbirths. She is on the scientific committee of Countdown to 2015 and co-chairs the Health Systems and Policy Working Group.
Affiliations
Centres
Teaching
Co-organiser of the Foundations in Reproductive Health module for the MSc on RSHR, and contributing to teaching throughout the academic year for example on the DTM&H as well as supervising several PhDs. Currently no scope for new PhDs.
Research
Her research is focused on RMNCH, ranging from burden estimation and life course epidemiology including improving the input data, through to implementation research and impact assessment. She developed with Simon Cousens, the first national cause-of-death estimates for 4 million neonatal deaths, published in 2005 in The Lancet Neonatal series and WHO World Health Report. She also co-led The Lancet stillbirth series in 2011 and 2016 including developing WHO’s first national estimates of stillbirth rates, highlighting 2.6 million stillbirths worldwide. In 2011 she coordinated the first ever national estimates for preterm birth, published in Lancet (with Hannah Blencowe and Simon Cousens) and co-led the team for The Born Too Soon report, with over 50 partner agencies to outline the data and actions to address 15 million preterm births, garnering major media attention. Currently working on estimates of Group B Strep infections worldwide, with Anna Seale and others. She continues to work with teams of experts to improve lifecourse epidemiological, with increasing focus on impairment free survival. She works on improved health system measurement, intervention trials and a number of large scale evaluations.
