James H. Cross is an Assistant Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology within the NEST360 Alliance and co-leads the Healthcare-Associated Infection Interest Group at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). With a background in clinical microbiology and data science, James specialises in neonatal health in low- and middle-income countries.

His research is dedicated to identifying practical strategies to decrease neonatal infections by integrating clinical, health data science, and health systems-based research. James is particularly interested in enhancing clinical bacteriology services (e.g., blood culture and point-of-care sepsis diagnostics), antibiotic stewardship in high-burden environments, and reducing neonatal hospital-acquired infections, antimicrobial resistance, and mortality.

Within his leadership positions at LSHTM, James co-directs the NEST360 Infection Workstream and the associated NEST360/UNICEF Implementation Toolkit Health System Building Block. In this capacity, he supports the improvement of infection prevention, detection, and control across 67 newborn units in Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya, and Nigeria. James has also co-led the co-design and operationalisation of the NEST360 Neonatal Inpatient Dataset within these facilities, facilitating real-time data flow and analysis from over 120,000 newborn admissions annually for the NEST360 Quality Improvement Facility Dashboard.

James holds a BSc. Hons. in Medical Microbiology with a Year in Industry (MRCG at LSHTM) from the University of Bristol (2015) and a PhD in Epidemiology & Population Health from LSHTM (2020). James' LSHTM/Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation sponsored PhD studentship, conducted over five years at MRCG in The Gambia, culminated in a thesis titled "Iron and Infection: Neonatal Iron Transition". This work explored the immunological response of hepcidin-mediate hypoferremia in the early hours of postnatal life in full-term, preterm and low birthweight newborns.