Joy is an African-born, British-trained paediatrician and perinatal epidemiologist with 30 years’ experience especially in sub-Saharan Africa including: clinical care, epidemiological burden estimates, implementation/evaluation of maternal, newborn and child care services. Her paediatric training was in the UK, followed by teaching, implementation and research, mainly living in Africa. Her MPH was from Emory, Atlanta, USA, whilst at CDC, and her PhD at Institute of Child Health, London. For 10 years, she was Director of Evidence and Policy for Saving Newborn Lives/Save the Children. She has been a full time professor at LSHTM since 2023, and was Director of the MARCH Centre (Maternal Adolescent Reproductive & Child Health) from 2013-2023 seeing growth from 200 to over 500 academics.

Her main contribution to global health has been developing the evidence-base to measure and reduce the global burden of 2.3 million neonatal deaths, 2 million stillbirths, and 13.4 million preterm births, including informing Sustainable Development Goal targets. She has published >340 peer-reviewed papers including leading several influential Lancet series, with wide media and policy uptake. H-index ~120. She and her research team work on multi-country studies regarding newborn health, stillbirths and child development worldwide, including large scale implementation research on small and sick newborn care with NEST360 Alliance across Africa and novel work on Group B Streptococcus with WHO and others. She is on WHO’s STAGE committee, and Global Statistics committee.

She is a champion for equitable and diverse research leadership. Joy is one of the few women nominated to membership of both UK Academy of Medical Sciences and USA National Academy of Medicine.

Twitter @joylawn