Prof. Kamija Phiri Wins EDCTP award

Congratulations to Prof. Kamija Phiri for being awarded the Scientific Leadership Prize from the European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP) on 9th November 2023 in Paris, France during the 2023 EDCTP Forum. The prize is awarded to excellent world-class scientists in sub-Saharan Africa up to 50 years of age working on HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and neglected infectious diseases.

Professor Phiri is a clinical Epidemiologist, a senior academic and expert in clinical trials in malaria and its linked major co-morbidity, anemia. He has dedicated his time to building research capacity and testing health technologies to prevent diseases (malaria), which is in line with the EDCTP remit of enhancing research capacity and accelerating the development of new or improved medical interventions for the identification, treatment, and prevention of poverty-related infectious diseases. He has contributed to the development of a new health intervention, dubbed Post-discharge Malaria Chemoprevention (PDMC), that was recently adopted by WHO in the control of malaria.

He has built on concepts discovered during his Ph.D. research of high post-discharge mortality in children recovering from severe anemia to proof-of-principle and confirmatory trials of a preventive intervention (PDMC, see above) leading to policy adoption by WHO as a novel malaria prevention strategy. He now works with MoH in designing PDMC implementation strategies, representing the full cycle of research to policy to practice. PDMC reduces deaths by 77% and readmissions by 58%.