Africa Health Research Institute

Kathy Baisley is a statistician and the head of the Data Science Unit at AHRI. She is an associate professor in medical statistics and epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). At AHRI, She leads of team of research data managers, biostatisticians, and data scientists – who are also responsible for AHRI’s data repository. Kathy’s expertise is the design and analysis of intervention trials and epidemiological studies, with a particular interest in cluster randomised trials and complex interventions. She has been involved in intervention trials since 1999, first as a statistician in the pharmaceutical industry for seven years, and subsequently in an academic setting. Kathy has lived and worked across sub-Saharan Africa, including in Tanzania, Uganda, Nigeria and Zambia, and has been with AHRI since 2015. Her research focuses on HPV vaccine trials, and HIV prevention intervention trials. Other areas of interest are HPV epidemiology and the role of the vaginal microbiome in determining susceptibility to HPV, HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, particularly around the time of sexual debut. Kathy has published over 170 peer-reviewed journal articles and is a member of several trial advisory committees. She is dedicated to research capacity strengthening, and provides mentorship and support in statistical methodology and study design. She also teaches on statistics and epidemiology courses at AHRI and LSHTM, and supervises MSc and PhD students.