Prof. Amelia (Mia) Crampin is the Director of MEIRU, with oversight of the scientific activities, laboratories and data management across the organisation.
Mia has been associated with MEIRU/KPS since 1998, living at the Chilumba campus until 2013, when she relocated to Lilongwe. Her background is in Clinical Medicine and Microbiology, specialising in Public Health and Epidemiology.
Mia has published over 200 papers with MEIRU in predominantly in infectious disease and more latterly, NCD epidemiology and has supervised and mentored many early career researchers in Malawi. She is the Principal Investigator of the Healthy Lives Malawi programme, and represents MEIRU in several national working groups and expert bodies within the region and is the contact point for a large number of national and international collaborators.
She is Professor of Global Health Epidemiology at the University of Glasgow and Professor of Epidemiology with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and holds an Honorary position at the Malawi College of Medicine and the University of Toronto.
Read Mia’s profile in the Malawi Medical Journal here: https://wrww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6526335/
Laurence Tembo is the Finance Manager for MEIRU. Laurence is responsible for financial management and reporting, coordinating and maintaining a cash flow management and forecasting system, monitoring programme support costs and ensuring organisational internal controls and systems are adhered to among other duties. Laurence has seventeen years’ experience in the public sector and with Non-Governmental Organizations including the Lilongwe University of Science and Technology and the CCAP Development Department.
Laurence is a fellow of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (FCCA) and a Certified Public Accountant (CPA). He graduated with a Master’s degree in Finance from the University of London in 2014 and is a member of the council of examiners and assessors of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Malawi (ICAM).
Dr Abena Amoah is Science Programme Manager at MEIRU’s Karonga campus where she has oversight over research activities. Abena holds a PhD in immunoepidemiology from University of Leiden in the Netherlands and an MSc in epidemiology from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her undergraduate training was in biological sciences and graduated from Mount Holyoke College in the United States.
Abena started off her research career as a clinical research assistant at the Laboratory of the Biology of Addictive Diseases at Rockefeller University in New York City where she worked for two years. She then relocated to Ghana where she worked at the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research for almost 10 years coordinating population studies that focused on immune responses to parasitic worm (helminth) infections.
Prior to joining MEIRU in 2019, Abena was a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University Medical Center and was part of the project management team for the EDCTP-funded freeBILy project evaluating the accuracy of antigen tests to diagnose Schistosoma infections in women and young children in Gabon and Madagascar.
She is a member of the International Epidemiology Association (IEA), American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH) and the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (EAACI).
Abena’s research has focused on immune responses to helminths in urban and rural populations and she has an interest in understanding mechanisms underpinning protection against or susceptibility to noncommunicable diseases in populations in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Dr Chifundo Knjala is the MEIRU data documentalist. He is responsible for facilitating data discovery, access and (re)use for MEIRU researchers and collaborators. Currently he is overseeing the development of an internal data repository, building an online catalogue of MEIRU data, contributing to the MEIRU data management strategy, and coordinating an international technical working group for MEIRU open data.
Chifundo also has technical team coordination and metadata development roles in INSPIRE and ALPHA respectively. MEIRU is a founding member of these two networks.
Prior to joining MEIRU, he worked in a social policy analysis role at UNICEF and in population health researcher and data/ metadata management roles in Health and Demographic Surveillance Systems and their collaborations for almost a decade.
Chifundo holds a BSc honours degree in Statistics, an MPhil in Demography from University of Cape Town and a PhD from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of London.
Chifundo has research experience in the areas of HIV mortality and Findable Accessible Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) data stewardship.
Louis Banda is the Laboratory Manager for MEIRU, responsible for day to day running of the laboratory research work both in Lilongwe and Karonga, sample storage, laboratory procurement, advising researchers on laboratory issues as well as assisting on budgets for studies involving the laboratories.
Louis is a qualified Laboratory Scientist having obtained a Post Graduate Diploma and a Masters in Infectious Diseases from University of London-London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Louis joined MEIRU in 2007 as a Lab Technologist and was later promoted to assistant laboratory manager in 2014 before taking up his current position from July 2016.
Albert Lazarous Nkhata Dube, BAH, MSc; Research Manager for Healthy Lives Malawi and member of the Senior Management Team at Malawi Epidemiology and Intervention Research Unit. Albert has been with MEIRU from 2008 to 2012 and since November 2015 to present. Albert leads the establishment and management of the urban and rural health and demographic surveillance systems that creates a platform for the implementation of short and long term epidemiological studies.
Albert’s recent work has been around evaluation of policies, interventions and data collection approaches. Albert’s growing research interests are in the areas of the sociology of health and well-being, human subjects’ long term participation and engagement in research and population dynamics.
Dr Robert Stewart is a practicing psychiatrist and MRC Senior Clinical Research Fellow in Global Mental Health who is seconded to MEIRU to lead the mental health aspects of Generation Malawi and Healthy Lives Malawi.