International Advisory Board

The International Advisory Board (IAB) brings expertise from a range of research and professional disciplines, which have been invited to provide strategic, scientific and other advice to the Validation and Oversight group, drawing on their relevant expertise and experience. It is doing this in order to help the grant’s activities remain true to their purpose and is assisting in its development, promotion and impact.

Chair - Professor Thomas G Weiser

Professor Weiser is a Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh and Associate Professor of Surgery, Stanford. He works as a general and trauma surgeon, and surgical intensivist; he cares for injured patients and those with acute surgical emergencies and manages critically ill surgical patients in the Intensive Care Unit.

His research is focused on evaluating the role of surgical care in the delivery of health services in resource-poor settings, particularly low and middle-income countries. He is interested in barriers to access and provision of surgical care, the quality of surgical services, and outcomes research. His current projects focus on quality and cost effectiveness of care, and strategies for improving the safety and reliability of surgical delivery in resource-poor settings. From 2006-2009 he was part of the World Health Organization’s Safe Surgery Saves Lives program where they quantified the global volume of surgery and created, implemented, evaluated, and promoted the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist.

He is the clinical advisor to Lifebox, a charity devoted to saving lives through safer surgery. The charity is currently engaged in a program to improve compliance with surgical safety standards in low resource settings, particularly as they pertain to infection prevention and control.

Board members

Vanessa Carter

Vanessa Carter is an antibiotic resistance advocate and Stanford University Medicine X e-Patient scholar. Due to a severe car accident in 2004, Vanessa spent ten years in the medical system reconstructing her face with a multidisciplinary team which later resulted in MRSA. She is also the founder of Health Care Social Media South Africa (#hcsmSA) which is a monthly Twitter chat in South Africa. She has also recently completed the first CPD Accredited course about e-Patients in South Africa through SAMA and trained several organisations about the effective use of HCSM including TB Proof. She is an advisor to the South African Antibiotic Stewardship Program (SAASP), infection control.tips, eyeforpharma among others. She has presented at various events including the Africa CDC at the African Union and Africa Health’s digital summit, is a patient reviewer for the BMJ, been a guest expert for the NHS Digital Academy through Edinburgh University’s MSc Global e-Health course and participated on the Presidential Task team for the NHI.

Steven Hoffman

Steven J. Hoffman JD PhD LLD is the Director of the Global Strategy Lab, a Professor of Global Health, Law, and Political Science at York University, and the Scientific Director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research's Institute of Population & Public Health. He holds courtesy appointments as a Professor of Clinical Epidemiology & Biostatistics (Part-Time) at McMaster University and Adjunct Professor of Global Health & Population at Harvard University, and, for the 2018-2019 academic year, as a Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford.
He is an international lawyer licensed in both Ontario and New York who specializes in global health law, global governance and institutional design. His research integrates analytical, empirical and big data approaches to craft global regulatory strategies that better address transnational health threats, social inequalities and human rights challenges.

Helen Lambert

Helen Lambert is Professor of Medical Anthropology, University of Bristol. Interests include the application of anthropological perspectives to a range of public health issues: anthropological and interdisciplinary research on antimicrobial resistance, social and cultural dimensions of health systems, the role of ethnographic and other forms of qualitative research evidence in the formulation and evaluation of public health interventions and popular understandings of health, illness and therapy. Helen leads a Newton Fund project on Pathways to Antibiotic Use in rural China and has recently been awarded one of four UK-China AMR Hubs on Strategies to Reduce the Burden of Antimicrobial Resistance. She is a member of WHO's Strategic Technical Advisory Group on AMR and sits on the judging panel for the Longitude Prize.

Martin McKee

Martin McKee is Professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (building on a previous collaborative research project on innovation adoption for infection control/(AMR in English Trusts and specifically for expertise in public health, national and international policy formation and implementation).

Jacqui Reilly

Jacqui Reilly is the Director of Nursing at National Services Scotland (NSS) and has executive leadership responsibility for Allied Health Professions, Healthcare Associated Infection and Quality.  She has a background in public health and clinical leadership in the NHS. Having authored more than 150 peer-reviewed publications and contributed extensively to national and international guidelines, Jacqui was past elected chair of the European Centre for Disease Control (ECDC) HAI net coordinating committee and has contributed to UK policy groups. She is a fellow of the Faculty of Public Health (FFPH) and a fellow of the Royal Society of Biology (FRSB) and has a joint appointment at Glasgow Caledonian University, where she is a Professor of Infection Prevention and lead for the Safeguarding Health through Infection Prevention (SHIP) research group.

Neil Squires

Dr Neil Squires is Director of Global Public Health for Public Health England, with responsibility for PHE’s global health activity. Neil has spent the majority of his career working internationally, including being the Head of Profession for Health at the Department for International Development (2011-2014). He spent 4 years working in Mozambique, including being the donor lead for multi-agency support to Mozambique’s Health Sector Wide Approach (SWAp). He spent two years working in Bangladesh and was again donor lead for a multi-donor health sector programme. Neil spent five years as the Senior Health Adviser for West and North Africa, covering Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone and working on DFID’s Africa Regional Programmes. Other roles have included three years working at the European Commission, during which time he developed the EU Strategy on Human Resources for Health in Developing Countries, two years as a District Health Officer in Malawi, and a year working in Leprosy control in India.

Neil completed his public health training in the North West and was a Consultant in Public Health in Liverpool, prior to joining DFID. Neil has been a Board Member of the Global Health Workforce Alliance and was co-chair of one of eight World Health Organisation Working Groups which contributed to the development of the Global Human Resources for Health Strategy. He is also International Registrar of the UK Faculty of Public Health, and Chair of the Governance Committee of the Malaria Consortium.

Walter Zingg

Dr Walter Zingg is a consultant in the Infection Prevention and Control Programme and WHO Collaborating Centre for Patient Safety at the University of Geneva Hospitals in Switzerland. His background is in paediatrics, infectious diseases and infection prevention and control (IPC). The publication list includes original articles in peer-reviewed journals and various book chapters. He coordinated the European Commission-funded project “Prevention of Hospital Infection by Intervention and Training” (PROHIBIT) and was the main project manager and leading scientist of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) initiated a systematic review and expert consensus to define key components in the organisation of IPC. Based on these key components, the World Health Organization (WHO) elaborated its most recent core components on IPC. He further acted as an expert for the WHO hand hygiene guideline, the most recent Joint Commission recommendations on central line-associated bloodstream Infections, the new WHO guidelines on core components in infection prevention and control, in various ECDC HAI-Net meetings, and he contributed to the new technical document for the ECDC point prevalence survey. He has research experience in multimodal prevention programmes on catheter-related bloodstream infections, in healthcare-associated infection (HAI) surveillance, in prevalence surveys, in economic aspects of healthcare-associated outbreaks, in systematic reviews, and quality assessment patient safety studies. He organised five international courses on implementation in IPC. He is a member of EUCIC (European Committee on Infection control) and soon to become a board member of ESGNI (ESCMID Study Group for Nosocomial Infections). Finally, he coordinated the national Swiss point prevalence surveys on healthcare-associated infections and antibiotic use. He came to ASPIRES due to his work on the core components for IPC, his international network in the field, and his experience in implementation research.