People

Rachel Pullan

Rachel is an Assistant Professor in Infectious Disease Epidemiology in the Department of Disease Control at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Rachel leads the London Applied & Spatial Epidemiology Research (LASER) group which specialises in GIS, spatial analysis, and field-based research including large cluster randomised trials of public health interventions. LASER develop and maintain the Global Atlas of Helminth Infections. 

As well as general issues in the design and evaluation of NTD control programmes, her work focuses on contextual issues influencing the effectiveness of interventions.

Rachel has a first degree from Imperial College, and an MSc and PhD from LSHTM. She is the Associate Director of the London Centre for NTD Research, Associate Editor with PLOS NTDs and a member of the STH Advisory Committee.

Jorge Cano Ortega

Jorge is an Assistant Professor in spatial epidemiology currently working on a GAHI project modelling the spatial distribution of lymphatic filariasis in Africa. He is responsible for the development of the global lymphatic filariasis database and keeping this data repository up-to-date.He is also providing GIS support and training to African countries implementing NTD control. Jorge has broad experience in using GIS for environmental modelling and has conducted epidemiological and entomological surveys related to vector-borne diseases in Equatorial Guinea and Mozambique.

Jorge’s PhD focused on the spatial distribution of tsetse fly populations and risk modelling of sleeping sickness transmission in Equatorial Guinea.

Jessie K. Hamon

Jessie is a Project Manager at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She has experience managing health systems strengthening projects and operational research in Tanzania, Rwanda and South Africa. She currently manages several field-based research projects focused on NTD control programmes, including large cluster randomised trials.

Jessie completed a first degree at McGill University and received an MSc in Community Health from the Université de Montréal. Her thesis focused on community efforts to address violence against women and girls in rural South Africa. 

Emanuele Giorgi

Emanuele is an MRC Fellow in Biostatistics based at Lancaster University. He is a statistician working at the interface between statistical methodology development and applications to spatial epidemiology of tropical diseases. He is currently working on the development of geostatistical methods to combine disease prevalence data from different diagnostics procedure, with a particular focus on lymphatic filariasis infection. He is also involved in the Tumikia project, by developing zero-inflated geostatistical models for soil-transmitted helminths risk mapping. He is the lead developer of PrevMap, an open-source R package which implements state-of-the-art methods for prevalence mapping.

He completed his PhD in Statistics and epidemiology at Lancaster University under the supervision of Prof. Peter Diggle. He is currently a lecturer at the Ghana and Tanzania centres of the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

Anwar Musah

Anwar is a Research Assistant at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. His work is broadly focused on collating and managing prevalence records on STHs/schistosomiasis obtained from peer-reviewed publications and other sources into GAHI database, and developing maps for illustrating the distribution of helminthic infections across the African, Asian-Pacific and Latin-American regions.

Anwar has a MSc in Modern Epidemiology from Imperial College London. He has recently completed his doctoral studies at the University of Nottingham. His PhD research was focused on the potential impacts of environmental exposures to toxic geochemical elements on cancer risk in the UK population.