Meet the team

Dr Eimear Cleary is a spatial epidemiologist with particular interests in how human mobility, climate and ecology shape the transmission of malaria and vector-borne disease. Her research focuses on utilising novel modelling approaches and methodologies for the spatial and temporal estimation of infection prevalence in order to inform control and elimination interventions.

Roly is a Professor in Global Health with an interest in malaria control and elimination and health systems strengthening. He has more than 25 years experience in malaria clinical trials, chemoprevention, programmatic policy and strategy, and health financing. He was the director of the Malaria Elimination Initiative at the University of California San Francisco between 2011–2021, where he led a team working across all aspects of malaria elimination, developed the Malaria Elimination Toolkit, and supported the development of regional elimination initiatives including the Asia Pacific Malaria Elimination Network and the Southern African Development Communities Elimination 8 (E8). At LSHTM he now leads the OPTiMIX project — Optimising the mix of malaria interventions including malaria vaccines, malaria chemoprevention and PBO-LLINs.

Matthew Ippolito, M.D., Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Medicine and the Director of Clinical Epidemiology for the Southern and Central Africa International Centers of Excellence for Malaria Research (ICEMR). He completed fellowships in Infectious Diseases and Clinical Pharmacology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he received his Ph.D. in Clinical Investigation from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He also served in the Peace Corps in Ghana, West Africa.

Dr Ippolito specialises in global health and tropical infectious diseases with a research focus on malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. His NIH-supported research programme explores the clinical pharmacology of antimalarial drugs and the genetic epidemiology of drug resistance. He is also a co-developer of a computer vision-based machine learning platform for malaria diagnostic and research applications, and serves on the editorial board of Frontiers in Malaria.

Dr Shengjie Lai leads the Dynamics and Mobility (DM)/Spatial Epidemiology and Public Health (SEPH) thematic group within WorldPop. He has an interdisciplinary background across medicine, epidemiology, statistics, and geography, and rich working experience in disease control institutes and universities. His research has transformed understanding of how population dynamics, environmental change, and socioeconomic patterns drive infectious disease risks and population health vulnerabilities. He has authored more than 180 peer-reviewed publications and 17 book chapters, including high-impact papers in Nature, Science, BMJ, Lancet Infectious Diseases, Nature Human Behaviour, and Nature Communications.

Andy Tatem has been a Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Southampton since 2013, following the initiation of WorldPop at the University of Florida. His research has led to pioneering approaches to the use and integration of satellite, survey, cell phone and census data to map the distributions and movement patterns of vulnerable populations for disease, disaster and development applications. He runs international collaborations with national governments, UN agencies and data providers, and leads multiple research projects funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, World Bank, GAVI, and the Clinton Health Access Initiative. He has authored more than 300 publications cited over 40,000 times, and is the recipient of awards from the Royal Geographical Society, Academy of Social Sciences, and the UN.