Editorial Board Members in the Pilot

orcid.org/0000-0003-0650-135
Research interests: Type 2 diabetes, venous thrombosis, genome-wide association studies, metabolomics study, twin modeling, mental health (personality research)

Ruifang Li (a.k.a. Ruifang Li-Gao for publications) was originally trained as a computer scientist and bioinformatician (BSc and MSc). She has been working as a research assistant in the area of chemoinformatics (at Bonn University, Germany) and neuroscience (at Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany) from 2010 till 2014. From 2014 to 2020, she obtained her PhD degree in Clinical Epidemiology at Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), the Netherlands. During her PhD, her main research focus was on untangling the metabolic and genetic basis of metabolic and cardiovascular diseases by using large-scale population based cohort studies. Currently, she worked as a postdoc at Tilburg University and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She aims to use multi-omics approach to investigate the biological mechanisms of Type D (distressed) personality, and its relationship to diseases. She also acts as an associate editor (and statistical reviewer) for the journals of BMC Endocrine Disorders and BMC Cardiovascular Disorders since October 2020. Webpage.

orcid.org/0000-0002-4114-9106
Research interests: Evidence-Based Practice; Primary Care; Low value care; Overdiagnosis; Non-communicable Diseases; Clinical Epidemiology

Loai is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Evidence-Based Healthcare. His research expertise includes evidence synthesis, evidence-based practice, healthcare services, and primary care. He is a medical doctor (MD) from Palestine and completed a Master’s degree in clinical epidemiology at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany, followed by a PhD degree in evidence-based practice from Bond University, Australia. Webpage.

orcid.org/0000-0001-5637-3971
Research interests: Life course epidemiology; public health; general population studies; longitudinal studies; musculoskeletal disorders; rehabilitation medicine; osteoporosis. 

Petteri obtained his MD-PhD degree at the University of Oulu, Finland. His PhD dissertation in 2017 addressed the life-course determinants of vertebral size, a known contributor to vertebral fracture risk. Alongside clinical work at various medical institutions, Petteri currently serves as a post-doc fellow at the University of Oulu, with diverse research activity in life-course epidemiology and public health. His particular interest is in general population studies with longitudinal data on demographic, psychosocial, behavioural and clinical dimensions. Webpage.

Research interests: diabetes, hyperlipidemia, dementia, stroke, atherosclerosis, acne, primary care, routine healthcare data, pharmacoepidemiology, systematic review and meta-analysis

Zhirong completed a PhD in the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at University of Cambridge. He also holds a bachelor's degree in medicine and master's degrees in epidemiology and in primary care research. He was a research fellow in the Department of Population Medicine at Harvard University in 2018. Before his PhD, he worked as a biostatistician in Shantou-Oxford Clinical Research Unit and then as a research associate in Peking University School of Public Health. His current research interests are in the use of routine healthcare data and evidence synthesis to inform the management of cardiovascular diseases, dementia and diabetes. Webpage.

orcid.org/0000-0001-6953-0163
Research interests: Physical activity, exercise, aging, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, reproducibility, research integrity

Daniel received his BSc in kinesiology (exercise sciences) from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). Having a primary interest in exercise interventions in clinical conditions, he studied physical activity in context of aging, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes during his MSc and PhD. He established two main interests during a postdoctoral fellowship: (1) clinical trials and systematic reviews/meta-analyses of lifestyle interventions; and (2) meta-research in science dissemination practices. Daniel is based in Porto Alegre (Brazil), working as an assistant professor of research methods, chief of the clinical research center at the Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre, and an academic mentor for graduate students and postdocs. Webpage.

orcid.org/0000-0001-6774-3149
Research interests: Alcohol; coronary heart disease; stroke; small vessel disease; Mendelian randomization; GWAS

Steven is an Epidemiologist based within the Stroke Research Group at the University of Cambridge with an interest in cardiovascular disease and related conditions.
His work utilises genome-wide association studies (GWAS) alongside bioinformatic approaches to obtain insights in disease aetiology. This includes applying techniques such as Mendelian randomization to prioritise therapeutic targets and inform clinical or public health decision making.
More widely, he has an interest in individual participant data meta-analysis, the use of electronic health records in medical research, the application and integration of various “-omic” technologies (e.g. metabolomics, proteomics, phenomics), machine learning and modelling of longitudinal data. Webpage.

orcid.org/0000-0001-9543-8360
Research interests: Global Health, Malaria, RSV, Child Health, Childhood Immunization, Health Access, Population health

Emelda heads the Population Health Unit within the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme in Kenya which aims to understand determinants of health transitions and vulnerabilities at fine scales across Africa and works to embed the use of data for decision-making by national ministries. Emelda has 20 years of Population and Public Health research experience. Deep expertise in Impact evaluation, epidemiology, public health, statistics, data analytics and operations research with a focus on evaluations and contribution analysis. Prior to this position Emelda was a Program Officer/Gates Fellow within the Global Health Team at the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. She has worked on evaluating the public health impact of malaria control, on evaluating anti-retroviral treatment programs while at IHME and on developing strategies for primary health care at Philips Research Africa. Emelda has a PhD in Epidemiology, has been awarded two internationally competitive Wellcome Trust (UK) Fellowships and is widely published. Webpage.

orcid.org/0000-0002-9908-2936
Research interests: global health, nutrition, tuberculosis, malnutrition, stunting, wasting, anaemia, micronutrients, infectious diseases, nutritional immunity, epidemiology, maternal and child health, Tuberculosis control programmes, sickle cell disease

I am an Associate Professor at LSHTM with a joint appointment at the School of Tropical Medicine & Global Health, Nagasaki University in Japan. I am trained in biochemistry, immunology, epidemiology and public health nutrition. Before my appointment in Japan, I spent most of my research career living and working in West and then East Africa working on malaria in pregnancy, then malaria associated anaemia in children, which led onto work in sickle cell disease. My research interests are focused on interactions between nutrition and disease, mostly infections, and malnutrition in maternal and child health in low- and middle-income countries. Much of my current work is trying to better describe the causes and effects of undernutrition, diabetes and transient hyperglycaemia in Tuberculosis; how they can be prevented, diagnosed and managed in persons with TB disease, with research in Asia and the Western Pacific Region. Webpage.