Professor Trudie Lang

Trudie Lang’s career has focused on combating diseases of poverty through the generation of high-quality evidence. She has worked in Industry, academia and UN organisations. Within each role aiming drive better health outcomes in vulnerable communities by enabling local leadership and ground-up implementation of health research. Within the University of Oxford, she founded and leads The Global Health Network (www.TheGlobalHealthNetwork.org) which is a major international collaborative enterprise that sets out to improve health by improving research. This is achieved by finding better processes, building local capacity, supporting careers and enabling research in situations and diseases where live-saving data is woefully lacking. Trudie has worked extensively in infectious diseases throughout her career having worked in malaria drug and vaccine development, and working on helminths,TB, HIV and many other neglected tropical diseases. This experience was taken up in her work within both the Ebola and Zika outbreaks, and more recently with COVID-19. In all these she worked to support and enable a locally-led research responses from regions and communities who do not having existing research experience. Within the COVID-19 pandemic Trudie and her team set up the Global COVID-19 Research Implementation Hub. Here many thousands of researchers across the globe are working together and sharing their know-how to plan and operate studies to better understand and mitigate the impact of the pandemic within their situation and communities.