Prof. Joy Lawn

Name: Professor Joy Lawn

Organisation: London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, United Kingdom

Dr. Lawn is the director of the MARCH Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a Senior Health Advisor to Save the Children. She is an African-born paediatrician and perinatal epidemiologist. She has over 20 years’ experience in newborn health with a specific focus on Africa, including four years as a lecturer and neonatologist in Ghana. She shifted to public health and global estimation whilst at the WHO Collaborating Center, CDC Atlanta, USA (1998-2001), and then at the Institute of Child Health, London, UK (2001-2004), completing a Masters of Public Health at Emory University, Atlanta and PhD at University College London. In March 2013, she was appointed Professor of Maternal, Reproductive and Child Health and Director of MARCH Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. For over ten years she worked for Save the Children's Saving Newborn Lives program, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Most recently she was their Director of Global Evidence and Policy, and worked with governments and partners to integrate, scale up and evaluate newborn care. In 2011 she was appointed as the UK AID (DfID)’s Senior Research Fellow for newborn health (part-time). Since 2004, Joy has coordinated the United Nation’s Child Health Epidemiology Reference Group’s (CHERG) Neonatal Team and developed the first cause-of-death estimates for 4 million neonatal deaths each year, published in 2005 in The Lancet Neonatal series and WHO's World Health Report. She also co-led The Lancet Stillbirth series in 2011 including developing WHO’s first national estimates of stillbirth rates, highlighting 2.6 million stillbirths worldwide. In 2011 she coordinated the first ever national estimates for preterm birth, published in The Lancet