Board of Directors

Charles is a public health entomologist with over 20 years’ experience in the conduct of entomological studies in Kenya, Ethiopia and Eritrea.

His focus has been the study of malaria vectors and has worked on the large-scale evaluation of insecticide-treated bed nets, insecticide resistance, and integrated vector management (IVM) strategies. He has developed and implemented vector surveillance systems at local and national scales. Charles serves on various national and international technical committees.

He maintains a keen interest in translating research into policy and practice and played an important role in the formulation of national policy on IVM. He is the current President of the Pan African Mosquito Control Association (PAMCA), an association of African entomology professionals dedicated to Improving human health through suppression of mosquitoes and mosquito borne diseases.

I am a medical entomologist working at OCEAC Cameroon. After haven completed a PhD in parasitology at the university of Yaoundé 1 Cameroon, I joined OCEAC for postdoctoral studies before been recruited as a full researcher in this institution. I have been working in OCEAC as researcher and training coordinator for OCEAC public health school (CIESPAC). My research vision is to contribute to malaria elimination by focusing on alternative but neglected aspects which could contribute to disease control.

During my PhD and postdoctoral studies I conducted studies which highlighted the importance of local vectors in malaria transmission and the need for vector control operations to also target these vectors. These studies contributed in improving knowledge on these overlooked vectors and also reoriented the malaria vectors control strategy particularly in Cameroon. My studies on malaria vectors distribution in urban settings, permitted to describe the fast adaptation of malaria vectors to urban area, the rapid evolution of pyrethroid resistance in anopheles species and the variability of resistance mechanisms in vector populations. Findings of the study demonstrated the need for focus interventions in order to improve malaria control in urban settings. I am currently running a programme which goal is to assess the efficacy of larviciding for controlling malaria transmission in urban area (city of Yaoundé). I also hold a position of Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow.

Emma brings with her 15 years of Public Health Program Management experience and has worked extensively in Africa, Asia and Europe. In 2009 she co-founded the Pan-African Mosquito Control Association with Professor Charles Mbogo following a stint co-organising the 5th European Mosquito Control Association Workshop in Turin, Italy.

She holds 2 Masters degrees (Biology & Control of Disease Vectors and Public Health) and has spent the last 3 years working as a Strategy & Operations Consultant and Programme Manager at Connecting Organizations for Regional Disease Surveillance (CORDS) France. Prior to this she worked for the African Foundation for Development (AFFORD UK) and AMREF Health Africa UK, managing multi-country diaspora engagement and maternal, newborn and child health improvement programs in East and West Africa.

She brings remarkable program development and management skills in African and multi-cultural contexts and has recently been recruited to lead the implementation of a transformational country-wide fungal infections diagnostic program as Chief Executive of the Global Action Fund for Fungal Infections (GAFFI) Kenya. As a second generation member of the African diaspora, Emma is passionate about mobilising contributions from the African diaspora towards Africa's development.

Dr. Stephen Magesa is the Director of vector control operations at RTI International’s U.S. Agency for International Development in Tanzania.

Magesa holds a doctorate degree in epidemiology from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, a master of science degree in medical parasitology from the University of London, and a bachelor of science degree in zoology/ecology from the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. He also earned an MBA from a joint program between Maastricht School of Management and the East and Southern African Management Institute in the Netherlands and Tanzania, respectively.

Magesa is an expert in malaria vector control with more than 27 years of experience in malaria research, prevention and control programs in Africa, including Tanzania, Rwanda and Kenya. From 2010 to 2013, Magesa successfully managed as RTI’s chief of party indoor residual spraying operations supported by the U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative in Rwanda and Kenya.Prior to RTI, he served as the center director for the National Institute for Medical Research, Amani Medical Research Center, a leading malaria research center in Africa. He oversaw the center’s Africa-wide entomological and parasitological research, and fieldwork related to vector control technologies, vector ecology and insecticide resistance. He previously served as a member of the World Health Organization Pesticide Evaluation Scheme (WHOPES) working group, and he is currently an alternate member of the Technical Review Panel of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

In Tanzania, RTI collaborates with the national malaria control program to establish, scale-up and maintain comprehensive malaria vector control operations, including indoor residual spraying of households with insecticide and distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets, as well as strengthening disease surveillance systems to better monitor malaria morbidity and mortality and respond to malaria outbreaks in a more-timely fashion.

Dr. Magesa has received a number accolades for his exemplary work in this field of Malaria and another vector borne diseases in the East Africa Region. In 2014, he was awarded Tanzania’s National Best Health Scientist Award and National Health Innovation Award for his dedication to preventing and controlling malaria and other vector-borne diseases in Tanzania.

Currently, Diabate Abdoulaye is the head of the medical entomology laboratory of the Institut de Recherche en Science de la Santé/Centre Muraz, Burkina Faso. He received a Master’s degree at the University of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and a PhD degree at the University of Montpellier II, France. His PhD studies were related to the resistance of the malaria vector Anopheles gambiae to pyrethroids. His main focus was to describe the geographic distribution of resistance to pyrethroids in this mosquito species across Burkina Faso and to characterize the mechanisms and the ecological factors involved in its selection. Laboratory work included molecular techniques for characterizing genes and its haplotypes involved in insecticide resistance development in mosquito populations.

After his PhD degree, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the National Institutes of Health (USA) for 4 years. He was interested in “ecological specialisation” in Anopheles gambiae as major evolutionary force generating biological diversity, which may lead to speciation. Diabate has been back in his home institution since 2009 and is leading the medical entomology laboratory.  During his professional career, he has frequently interacted with various stakeholders worldwide (Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Benin, Senegal, Cameroon, Mali), and diverse scientists and faculties in France, United Kingdom and USA. Moreover, he has taken a number of elected courses, supervised students at Master and PhD levels and developed short educational programmes, public health oriented.

So far he has co-chaired several scientific sessions at international conferences (ASTMH, MIM) and was an invited speaker at George Washington University. He won the best oral presentation award in the 9^th International Meeting “Molecular Epidemiology and Evolutionary Genetics of Infectious Diseases”. Currently he is a reviewer of several journals (BMC Ecology, PlosOne, Malaria Journal etc), member of several professional bodies including the Scientific Coordinating Committee (SCC) of AMANET, and the African Network on Vector resistance to insecticides” (ANVR), Member of the Organizing Committee of the “Workshop on Population and Molecular Biology of Disease Vectors” that takes place in Crete, Greece every other year.

James volunteered with PAMCA for some time before joining the Board as a strategy specialist. He has worked with a global portfolio of nonprofits and NGOs for the last 12 years and loves working collaboratively to find solutions to complicated problems.

He received his Masters in social investment and the Diploma in charity accounting from Cass Business School, where he now serves as a visiting lecturer. In his day job, James leads an environmental and community charity near his home in the UK.