Rate My Professor Shabbar Jaffar

Professor Shabbar Jaffar is the Director of the UCL Institute for Global Health and Professor of Epidemiology in the Faculty of Population Health Sciences at University College London, appointed in July 2022. He holds a PhD in Epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Jaffar's distinguished career in global health epidemiology began in 1992 as a Medical Statistician at the University of Reading, followed by a role as Scientist at the Medical Research Council Laboratories in The Gambia (1993-1996). He then joined LSHTM, progressing from Lecturer in Medical Statistics and Epidemiology (1996-2000), Senior Lecturer (2000-2005), Reader (2005-2010), to Professor of Epidemiology (2010-2015). During this period, he served as Head of the MRC Tropical Epidemiology Group (2008-2011) and Director of the Karonga Prevention Study in Malawi (2011-2013). Prior to UCL, he was Professor of Epidemiology and Head of the Department of International Public Health at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (2015-2022).

His research focuses on clinical trials and epidemiology concerning the prevention and management of infectious and non-communicable diseases, including HIV, cryptococcal meningitis, diabetes, and hypertension, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. He leads studies evaluating integrated health services for chronic conditions in Tanzania and Uganda. Notable publications include the Lancet paper on the efficacy of the nine-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine in The Gambia (2005, cited over 1,100 times), the New England Journal of Medicine article on antifungal combinations for cryptococcal meningitis (2018, cited over 480 times), and the recent Lancet study on integrated management of HIV, diabetes, and hypertension (2023). Jaffar has received the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (2016-2021), Times Higher Education International Collaboration of the Year (2021), Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh (2011), and was elected to the Academy of Europe in 2025. He is also a Visiting Scholar at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (2022-2025) and contributes to teaching on evidence interpretation for policy and HIV control.