Professor Debra Jackson
Takeda Chair in Global Child Health, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, London, United Kingdom
Biography
Debra Jackson is the inaugural Takeda Chair in Global Child Health and former Co-Director of the MARCH Centre at LSHTM. Previously she held the position of Senior Health Advisor and Chief of Implementation Research and Delivery Science Unit, Health Section, UNICEF, where she focused on maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health program research, data and digital health. She is also Extraordinary Professor at the School of Public Health (SoPH), University of the Western Cape, South Africa. At the SoPH she served as principal investigator for a range of research projects, including the multi-country PROMISE-EBF trial on promoting exclusive breastfeeding and the National South African Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission of HIV Evaluation.
She has qualifications in nursing, public health, epidemiology and biostatistics. She has over 160 peer-reviewed publications and serves on several global and WHO advisory committees.
She lived in South Africa from 2000-2013 and has experience working across Africa, Asia, Pacific Islands and USA. In 2023 she was recognized as a B-rated ‘Internationally Acclaimed Researcher’ by the South African National Research Foundation.
Her research areas include health systems and implementation research; maternal, newborn and child health. Her current research includes the HIGH Horizons project focusing on climate, heat and the health of mothers and children. She also recently led a team at LSTHM in collaboration with the Gates Foundation to write a white paper on Climate Change and Maternal, Newborn and Child Health: Time for Action, and was a delegate to the COP30 Climate and Health pre-meeting in Brazil.