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Contributor Biography

Professor of Paediatric Tropical Infectious Diseases at the Faculty of Medicine and Director of the ICCARE Centre at the Global Centre of Health Innovation, Imperial College, London and an Honorary Fellow at MRC Clinical Trials Unit, University College, London. Over the last 17 years she has been based full-time at the East Africa, where she leads a research group that have highlighted the unique importance of emergency-care research, previously poorly appreciated as an area for specific funder or policy investment, as a highly targeted and cost-effective means of tackling childhood mortality in resource-limited sub-Saharan Africa. Her major research portfolio includes severe malaria, bacterial sepsis and severe malnutrition and large Phase III pragmatic clinical trials in emergency care. Her team conducted the largest trial in critically children ever undertaken in Africa (FEAST trial) examining fluid resuscitation strategies in children with severe febrile illness, showing that fluid boluses increased mortality compared to no-bolus (control). Her team is currently running two other large clinical trials investigating transfusion and other treatment strategies in 4000 African children with severe life-threatening anaemia (TRACT) and the optimum oxygen saturation threshold for which oxygen should be targeted and how best to administer oxygen in 4200 children (COAST: Children Oxygenation Administration Strategies Trial). In 2017her group expanded their work in fluid resuscitation to two key groups excluded from the FEAST trial children with gastroenteritis and severe malnutrition. They are undertaking Phase II safety and efficacy in these two groups in the GASTRO and GASTROSAM rehydration protocols respectively - testing current WHO recommendations against alternative rehydration strategies.