Simon Hay is a Reader of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the University of Oxford based in the Department of Zoology. He is funded by the Wellcome Trust under their Senior Research Fellowship scheme to manage the Malaria Atlas Project. Dr Hay investigates spatial and temporal aspects of mosquito-borne disease epidemiology to support the more rational implementation of disease control and intervention options. Time-series analysis techniques, population dynamic theory, remote sensing and geographical information systems are all exploited. His most recent research is focused at defining more accurately human populations at risk of malaria at global, regional and national levels.

Bob Snow has worked in Africa for the last 22 years. He is Professor of Tropical Public Health at the University of Oxford and head of the Malaria Public Health and Epidemiology Group in Nairobi, Kenya. His work began with the first clinical trials of Insecticide-treated bed nets in The Gambia and he has since developed a large programme of work on the public health burden of malaria in Africa and understanding ways in which this can be reduced through scientifically proven methods of intervention, effective partnerships with African governments and appropriate financing. He has published over 300 articles on malaria, is a technical advisor to the Kenyan Government and sits on a number of international malaria advisory panels. He is supported by the Wellcome Trust (UK) as a Principal Fellow and lives in Nairobi with his wife and three children. He oversees the MAP project along with the wider operational research agenda of the MPHEG.

Kevin Baird has worked most of the last 21 years in Southeast Asia, with other assignments in Guyana, Peru, and Ghana. He is currently the Vice Director of the Eijkman-Oxford Clinical Research Unit in Jakarta, Indonesia. Kevins work has engaged malaria and other parasitic diseases on many fronts; biochemistry, histopathology, epidemiology, immunology, drug resistance and clinical trials. In assisting the government of Indonesia in containing an epidemic of malaria in the Menoreh Hills of Central Java, Kevin came to appreciate the vital importance of geographic information systems in placing appropriate malaria control resources when and where needed. This is the interest he brings to this project. Kevin earned Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in Microbiology and Biochemistry at the University of Maryland, and a PhD in Medical Zoology at Tulane School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine. He transitioned from a 22-year career in the US Navy in 2006.

Simon Brooker is a Reader in Tropical Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and currently holds a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellowship. Simon has a long-standing interest in the spatial epidemiology of parasitic diseases, including helminth infections and malaria, with a specific focus on the use of GIS/RS and spatial modelling as tools for mapping and predicting the distribution of parasitic infections. He has worked extensively in Africa, where his close involvement with national control programmes has ensured the effective translation of research findings into practical action. He has previously lived in East and West Africa and is currently based full-time with MPHEG in Nairobi where he is investigating the epidemiology and spatial ecology of malaria and hookworm co-infection in East Africa. Within MAP, Simon has a specific focus on adding a dimension of polyparasitism to the malaria work, within a framework of infection mapping, disease burden estimation and tailoring control options.

Archie Clements is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland School of Population Health. His research interests include the spatial epidemiology of tropical parasitic diseases, including malaria and schistosomiasis. A major focus of his work has been the application of Bayesian statistical modeling, including Bayesian geostatistics and hierarchical models, to the planning of large-scale disease control programmes and disease surveillance. Examples of this work include the development of risk maps to inform the targeting of praziquantel to communities at-risk of schistosomiasis in sub-Saharan Africa, and spatial epidemiological studies of malaria in China, Afghanistan and Africa. Archie was previously employed at Imperial College London with the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative and completed a PhD at the University of London Royal Veterinary College in 2005.

Iqbal Elyazar graduated with a BSc in Statistics from Bogor Agricultural University in 1998. He was awarded an MPH in Health Informatics from University of Indonesia in 2004. His interests include biostatistics, public health surveillance, health informatics and geographic information systems. He has developed MalariaInfo and DengueInfo as malaria and dengue database software for disease control program in Indonesia. He has been working at US Naval Medical Research Unit No 2, Jakarta as Statistician/Data Manager since 1998.

Pete Gething obtained a Masters in Geography at the University of Southampton where he subsequently gained a PhD in collaboration with the MPHEG and University of Oxford on space-time modelling of malaria treatment burdens using imperfect health-system data. Pete joined MAP in 2008 after a further two years at Southampton as a research fellow and lecturer in GIS at the Centre for Geographic Health Research. Pete’s roles in MAP are to support the development and implementation of classical and Bayesian geostatistical approaches for addressing policy-relevant questions in tropical health. Current foci include the global mapping of malaria endemicity and defining methods to quantify and minimise uncertainty in the use of imperfect routine health system data.

Carlos Guerra Loaiza graduated with a medical degree from the Universidad Central, Ecuador, in 1996, an M.Sc. in Environmental Change and Management and a DPhil (PhD) from the from the University of Oxford, UK, in 2002 and 2008, respectively. He has worked on several aspects of global malaria mapping including historic changes in populations at risk and defining the current global distribution limits of Plasmodium falciparum malaria. He is responsible for the design, construction and maintenance of the MAP malaria database and for supervising and implementing the mapping geo-located spatial data. He is currently helping establish an American node for the MAP.

Peter Horby graduated with a medical degree from University College London in 1992 and subsequently trained in adult medicine, infectious diseases and public health in the U.K and Australia. After periods working for the U.K. Health Protection Agency and the World Health Organization he joined the Centre for Tropical Medicine of Oxford University in early 2006 and established an infectious diseases research unit in Hanoi, Vietnam. He is currently Director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ha Noi and has lived and worked in Viet Nam since 2003. He coordinates the activities of the MAP Asia-Pacific node which is run through the research unit in Ha Noi.

Rosalind Howes graduated from the University of Oxford in 2007 with a BA in Biological Sciences. Rosalind joined the MAP team in the same year as a research assistant for the Anopheles vector mapping project. In September 2008 she joined the inherited blood disorders project, assembling databases and mapping the distributions of Duffy negativity and G6PD deficiency gene frequencies as part of her doctoral research.

Caroline Kabaria graduated with a B.Sc. (Hons) in Geomatic Engineering from the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) in 2006, and is finalizing a Masters in Environmental Planning and Management at the University of Nairobi. She has been involved in GIS projects at Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD) and at Gath Consulting Engineers. She joined the MAP team in August 2007 as a research assistant specialising in GIS and supporting these aspects of the project.

Bui Huu Manh obtained a B.Sc. in Zoology in 1995 and an M.Sc. in Environmental Science in 1999 from the Natural Science University in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam. He has worked for ten years in the conservation field with five years experience on the application of Geographical Information Systems to conservation in Viet Nam, including the mapping of endangered species, biodiversity and ecological zones. He is  the author of one of the first Vietnamese language books, published in 2006, on the use of GPS and GIS. Manh joined the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ha Noi in October 2007 and he is responsible within the Asia-Pacific node for data acquisition and archiving, managing the malaria database and for geo-locating and spatial mapping of these data.

Juliette Mutheu has recently been appointed as the External Relations Manager for the Malaria Atlas Project at KEMRI-Wellcome Trust in Nairobi. Juliette is responsible for developing the media and public engagement activities of MAP and its evolving strategy to make better use the science behind MAP in international and national malaria health policy. Previously, she worked at KEMRI-Wellcome Trust as an Assistant Research Officer, identifying and assembling data on intervention coverage, global malaria financing and hospital reported malaria admissions data. She has a first degree in biomedical science and epidemiology. During her honours degree, Juliette was an executive producer for a medical radio show for young people partially funded by the City of Melbourne. The show involved managing a 15 member team of medical students who were either producers or presenters running medical shows that discussed health issues (chronic diseases, infectious diseases, travel illnesses, smoking and alcohol) for public awareness, Juliette was also involved in tutoring medical students in population health; epidemiology and biostatistics at Monash University.

Abdisalan Mohamed Noor graduated with a B.Sc. (Hons) in Surveying from the University of Nairobi in 1999. He joined the MPHEG in 2000 and was involved in developing a spatial infrastructure of health services in Kenya. He completed his Ph.D. on spatial models of access to and use of government health services in Kenya in 2005 with the Open University, UK, in collaboration with the MPHEG and the University of Oxford. He remains as post-doctoral research scientist at the MPHEG and his interests include investigating the spatial and socio-economic determinants of access to and use of health interventions among rural African communities, particularly understanding and modelling the dynamics of insecticide treated net uptake. Dr Noor is an honorary lecturer at the University of Nairobi, Department of Geospatial Engineering & Space Technology and has close links with several other Government of Kenya institutions. Noor’s contribution to MAP will be to help understand the relationship between global investment in anti-malarial commodities and its relation to populations at risk.

Robi Okara graduated with a B.Sc. (Hons) in Biology and Psychology from York University, Canada in 2004. She joined the MPHEG in 2006 and was involved in reviewing the MAP database PDFs for entomological data, geo-positioning of surveys and data entry. She has recently completed an MSc. in Biology and Control of Disease Vectors (2007 – 2008) from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She is currently involved in the abstraction and assembly of data for mapping the distribution of the main Anopheles malaria vectors.

Emelda Okiro graduated with a B.Sc. in Chemistry and Biochemistry from Egerton University, Kenya in 2001 and joined KEMRI-Wellcome Trust-Kilifi Unit the same year as a research assistant involved in a large field epidemiological project studying various aspects of RSV infection. Emelda completed her Ph.D. in 2007 from the Open University, UK, in collaboration with University of Warwick and the KEMRI/Wellcome Trust Research Programme in Kilifi on infectious disease epidemiology specifically studying the transmission dynamics of RSV infection, in particular the characterization of patterns of infection of this virus and associated disease within the community and specifically within the household. Dr Okiro joined the MPHEG and MAP in 2007 with a specific interest in developing research questions related to measuring and temporal heterogeneity in P. falciparum risk and how this relates to global malaria disease burdens.

Anand Patil graduated with a B.Sc. in physics from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California in 2001. He earned an M.Sc. at Northwestern University in applied mathematics Evanston, Illinois in 2002 and completed his Ph.D. in applied mathematics and statistics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. His dissertation work focused on inference of unknown rate functions in models of ecological dynamics and on software for Bayesian computation. At MAP, he is using Bayesian geostatistics to account coherently for multiple sources of uncertainty in producing maps of malaria endemicity.

Frédéric Piel graduated in 2000 with a geographical sciences degree (1st class Hons) from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium. He obtained his PhD in 2006 within the laboratory of Biological Control and Spatial Ecology at the ULB, using GIS, population models and genetics, to contribute to the study of the introduction and dispersal processes of invasive forest pests. Thanks to funding from the Wiener-Anspach Foundation, he joined the MAP team in 2007 to assemble a global database of the distribution of sickle-cell gene frequency and investigate the strength of the spatial correlation between this inherited blood disorder and the pre-control distribution of malaria endemicity at the global scale as predicted by the malaria hypothesis. A biomedical resource grant from the Wellcome Trust allowed to extend his work to mapping the global distribution of haemoglobin C, haemoglobin E, the α- and β-thalassaemias, ovalocytosis, Duffy negativity and G6PD deficiency.

Marianne Sinka gained her undergraduate degree in Environmental Biology (1st B.Sc. Hons) at South Bank University in 1998. Her PhD was awarded in 2004 by the Centre for Population Biology (CPB) at Imperial College. She has an extensive record of field-based entomological and ecological research and several years experience at the University of Oxford helping to coordinate the collection of distribution data for a variety of vector-borne diseases. This has culminated in her current post-doctoral position within the MAP team, managing the accumulation and abstraction of distribution data for the main Anopheline malaria vectors.

Dave Smith studied mathematics at Brigham Young University, and earned his PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University.  After a short postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland, he became an Assistant Professor in the Department of  Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, Maryland.  In 2003, he moved to the Fogarty International Center,  and in 2007, he became an Associate Professor in the Department of Zoology, and the Associate Director for Disease Ecology at the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida. Dave’s research interests are in the ecology of infectious diseases, mathematical epidemiology, the evolution of antimicrobial resistance, and the bioeconomics of infectious diseases.  His role in map is to lead, advise and help implement the epidemiological modelling components of the research.

Andy Tatem graduated with a B.Sc. in Environmental Sciences from the University of Southampton in 1998. He subsequently completed a PhD within the Department of Electronics at the University of Southampton, developing approaches for sub-pixel land cover mapping from satellite imagery. In 2002 he took up the position of Research Officer at the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford and in 2009 he moved to a faculty position at the Emerging Pathogens Insititute and Department of Geography at the University of Florida. His recent work is focused on the application of the optimization of population and urbanization mapping for malaria burden estimation, the dispersal of diseases and their vectors through global transport networks and quantifying population movements in relation to local malaria elimination planning. He provides essential support in the acquisition, assembly, archive and interpretation of all environmental and demographic data for MAP.

Walter Taylor is a London university trained doctor who has worked in general medicine, infectious and tropical diseases in a number of countries in Africa and Asia. He started his malaria research in 1995 in Indonesia. This work led to his MD thesis, “Clinical trials of new strategies for the prevention and treatment of Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax malaria in north eastern Papua, Indonesia.” Following eight years at WHO/TDR, where he worked on clinical trials of artemsinin based combinations, Walter Taylor joined the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ha Noi. He provides technical review and interpretation of P. vivax data and advises on clinical aspects of malaria.

William Temperley graduated from Cranfield University with an MSc in Geographical Information Management in 2006. Subsequently he completed several contracts developing web-based GIS applications. Will joined the MAP team in 2008. As the web developer of the project, his main tasks will be to make the MAP datasets publicly available and to create an innovative online user-friendly GIS interface for the MAP products.

Heiman Wertheim graduated in medicine from Leiden University, The Netherlands, in 1997 and specialized in medical microbiology and clinical epidemiology at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. He has a PhD on nosocomial infections. Since 2007 he has been based at the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ha Noi, Viet Nam, where he is head of the Microbiology Research laboratory. He has been involved in estimating the spatial limits of infectious diseases using GIS since 2005 and he is responsible for supporting Bui Huu Manh in the acquisition and interpretation of malaria data for the MAP Asia Pacific node and the development of the database and GIS functions of the MAP Asia-Pacific node.