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Our Inaugural Lectures provide an opportunity for our new professors to showcase their research and achievements in the field of global health.
Upcoming lectures
Professor Maryam Shahmanesh presents Revolution, Sex and Biosocial care: From a feminist’s voyage across Iran, Burma and Goa, to strengthening HIV resilience among adolescents and youth in South Africa.
During this inaugural lecture, Maryam will take you on a winding journey from her escape from Iran to UK to her final destination of co-developing and evaluating biosocial interventions, underpinned by principals of health and social justice. Prof Shahmanesh will illustrate this through her journey to develop and evaluate Thetha Nami ngithethe nawe (Let’s Talk) for adolescents and young people in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Thetha Nami ngithethe nawe is a Peer-Led Biosocial intervention, that delivers innovations in biomedical diagnosis, treatment and prevention of HIV and sexually transmitted infections through integration with sexual health and social care. She will describe her journey, from her formative experiences in peri-revolutionary Iran to her intellectual awakening to structural drivers in Cambridge and the development of her passion for infectious diseases in Zimbabwe and El Salvador.
Prof Shahmanesh will take a detour through her time in Yale, then as a project co-ordinator for Medicines Sans Frontières in Myanmar, and finally her PhD in Goa, India - where she fell in love with HIV, and understood the critical role structural drivers - poor human rights and criminalisation of groups of people such as sex workers and injection drug users, failed health systems, poverty, and stigma – play in driving the HIV epidemic. In Goa she showed how structural violence worsened the HIV risk environment for sex workers and in Burma she set up her first accessible sexual health and sexually transmitted infection clinic, in the Jade Mine area, named after a small white flower (Thazin) to reach criminalised and marginalised sex workers and mobile men. Themes that resurface and inform her work in South Africa.
Along the way, Prof Shahmanesh will introduce you to her family, friends, mentors, and mentees. Amazing women and men who have cultivated her intellectual curiosity, rigorous science, and commitment to social and economic justice and feminism. She will share her failures and celebrate success, especially amongst the amazing bright young women she mentors.
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Previous lectures
Professor Tim Colbourn - Lusaka-Lilongwe-London-Lagos: Journeys in Epidemiology, Health Systems Research and Evaluating Interventions
Tim Colbourn’s work focuses on the evaluation of health systems interventions to improve maternal, newborn and child health in places with high mortality and morbidity. In this inaugural lecture Tim will take you on a journey through the highlights and notable events of his career to date from his Master’s dissertation work in Lusaka, his first research job in the UK, his work in Malawi starting with four years based in Lilongwe and continuing to this day, to teaching in London, a variety of work in other places not beginning with L, and his most recent work in Nigeria, current work, and future plans. The talk will also be a journey through Tim’s mind, and the progression of his work in epidemiology, health systems research and evaluating interventions.
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