New director roles for the MRC in Africa
19 Dec 2013
Professor Umberto D’Alessandro has been appointed Director of the MRC Unit in The Gambia, and Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Disease Control, within the Faculty of Infectious and Tropical Diseases, at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. He will take on the new role from 1 January 2014, when Professor Tumani Corrah will step down to take up a new role as MRC Director, Africa Research Development.
As a clinical epidemiologist with specialist training in public health, Professor D’Alessandro has extensive experience of working in Africa and Asia. He led the evaluation of the national impregnated bed net programme based in Farafenni, The Gambia, for three years and ran a malaria vaccine clinical trial in Basse. After setting up the Unit of Epidemiology and Control of Parasitic Diseases at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, he then returned to The Gambia in January 2011 as Theme Leader of Disease Control & Elimination.
Professor Tumani Corrah has been Unit Director of the MRC Laboratories since 2004, following two years as acting director. Born in The Gambia, he trained in medicine in St Petersburg (then Leningrad), Russia, followed by Ibadan, Nigeria and then Edinburgh and Wales. He returned to The Gambia in 1982 to take up a clinical post at the MRC Hospital. A year later he started his PhD on the immunology of tuberculosis (TB). This involved pioneering work carrying out one of the first trials of immunotherapy to treat TB in Africa. Professor Corrah continued to move up the ranks at the unit, helping to strengthen its clinical research, until taking over from the previous director Professor Keith McAdam in 2002.
In his new role as Director, Africa Research Development, Professor Corrah will play a key part in consolidating and enhancing the MRC’s presence in Africa, acting as the MRC’s main pan-Africa point of contact and forging strong partnerships with other health-related institutions. His responsibilities will include identifying, guiding and developing new funding initiatives, particularly related to the development of early stage researchers, providing support and guidance for MRC directors in The Gambia and Uganda and strengthening collaborative research links between African institutions.