Joy E. Lawn

Joy is a Ugandan-born, paediatric/neonatal clinician, and perinatal epidemiologist with 35 years’ experience notably in sub-Saharan Africa including trials, complex evaluation of newborn and child health services, and epidemiological burden estimates for WHO and UNICEF. She has published >380 peer-reviewed papers with a H-index of ~130, including Lancet series, and has been in the top 1% of cited scientists worldwide since 2017.

Her paediatric and neonatal training were in the UK, followed by teaching, clinical care, and implementation research, mainly in Africa. Her MPH was from Emory, Atlanta, USA, whilst at CDC, and her PhD at Institute of Child Health, London. From 2005-2013 she was based in Cape Town, as the Director of Evidence and Policy for Saving Newborn Lives/Save the Children-US countries funded by Gates Foundation (140million) working on implementation research, policy change and skill-building across all African regions, as well as leading global UN perinatal estimates and series.

Joy’s main contribution to global health has been in developing the evidence-base to measure and address the global burden of 2.3 million neonatal deaths, 2 million third trimester stillbirths, and 13.4 million preterm births. She co-led Lancet Neonatal Survival series (2005), Lancet Stillbirth series in 2011 and 2016, plus Lancet Every Newborn series (2014), linked with the Every Newborn Action Plan, resulting in first SDG for neonatal survival endorsed at World Health Assembly, supported by 195 countries. She is co-chair of The Lancet Commission of Evidence-based Implementation.

She is Professor of Maternal, Reproductive & Child Epidemiology, at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and from 2013-2023 was Director of Maternal, Adolescent, Reproductive & Child Health (MARCH) centre growing this from 200 to over 600 academics including multiple disciplines organised around three research themes: Adolescents, Births, and Child health and development.

Joy and her research team of around 50, many based in Africa, working 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 linked to the widely used www.newborntoolkit.org.

She has served on many Global committees, such as WHO’s STAGE, Global Statistics and GBS committees. She is a champion for equitable and diverse research leadership and has supervised many PhDs and mentored scientists especially across Africa and enabled many large research collaborations with high-impact papers based on equitable principles. Joy is one of the few women nominated to both UK Academy of Medical Sciences and USA National Academy of Medicine.