Professor Shunmay Yeung
PhD MBBS FRCPCH MRCP DTM&H
Professor
Infectious Disease and Global Health
Shunmay Yeung is a paediatrician specisalising in infectious disease and global health with a background in health economics and operational research. Her research interests are broad but with a focus on malaria, and the diagnosis and management of acute febrile illness in children.
She is a PI and workpackage lead in the PERFORM collaboration and the DIAMONDS collaboratios, two ambitious EU Horizon 2020 projects co-ordinated by Prof Mike Levin of Imperial College which involves 12 sites in 8 countries in Europe, the Gambia and Nepal. PERFORM aims to develop and validate new "-omics" based diagnostic technologies to differentiation bacterial from viral infections. DIAMONDS aims to pilot a new multiclass diagnostic test to improve the management of acute febrile illness in and reduce unnecesary antimicrobial use. The workpackages led by Shunmay focus on the potential practical application of new diagnostic tools by understanding and comparing pathways of care for children with acute febrile illness across different settings and assessing the potential cost-effectivness of new approaches. Shunmay is also the lead paediatrician for the DfID funded FIEBRE consortium - a multi-country study (Laos, Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe) aimed at describing the aetiology of fever in both adults and children, in order to improve clinical management.
Her PhD was on antimalarial drug resistance and drug policy and was undertaken in Southeast Asia, under the supervision of Professors Sir Nicholas White and Dame Anne Mills, with funding from the Wellcome Trust. It employed economic and epidemiological modeling and field studies on the access to malaria diagnosis and treatment. In collaboration with the Cambodian national malaria control programme, she lead PACES (Proactive Case Detection and Community Particiation for the elimination of drug resistant malaria study) in Cambodia, as part of the DfID funded Tracking Resistance to Artemisinins Collaboration (TRAC), a large programme of research led by the Mahidol-Oxford Research Unit.
She was the co-lead for the Centre for Maternal, Adolescent, Reproductive and Child Health - Child Theme and is on the Malaria Centre steering committee.
She is active clinically as an honrorary consultant in Paediatric Infectious Disease at St Mary's Imperial College Hospital, London. She did her clinical training in London and worked as a government medical officer in a district hospital in rural KwaZulu/Natal in South Africa where she also undertook clinical research on HIV in children. In October 2014 she was deployed as a clinical advisor to Sierra Leone with Save the Children in order to help in the set up of the Ebola Treatment Centre in Kerrytown. She subsequently returned to Sierra Leone to supervise research on the managment and outcome of children admitted to Ebola Holding Units during the crisis.
She was Deputy Director of the ACT consortium and the co-ordinating investigator for the Artemisinin Resistance Confirmation, Characterization and Containment (ARC3) consortium, both funded by the BMGF. She has worked for WHO Geneva as as a Medical Officer in the Global Malaria Programme, is on the board of the Angkor Hospital for Children in Cambodia, and sits on a number of expert committees and advisory boards.
Shunmay currenly supervises six research degree students, four as primary supervisor include one DrPH student.
Affiliations
Centres
Teaching
She is a co-Module Organiser of Practical Skills for Clinical Research and was the Module Organiser of Control of Communicable Disease (distance learning).
She teaches on the LSHTM DTM&H and the East African DTM&H and co-leadings the Maternal and Child Health module of the new Nagasaki-London DTM&H. She has also taught on a number of MSc modules including Applied Communicable Disease Control; AIDS; and Economic Evaluation. She gives external lectures in both UK and abroad including and teaches and mentors doctors and medical students at St Mary's Hospital.
Research
In addition to the research described above methodological development in surveys of antimalarial quality; and analysis of the content of the "drug cocktails" commonly used to treat fevers in SE Asia; mixed methods evaluations of Village Malaria Workers and of the private sector roll-out of subsidised malaria rapid diagnostic tests in Cambodia; mapping of artemisinin resistance and mobile and migrant populations in SE Asia; cost-effectiveness modelling of G6PD testing and 8-aminoquinlonoes for the radical cure of P. vivax;
Selected Publications
