BMJ Global Health Grant: Judging panel

The judging panel is responsible for shortlisting applicants and selecting the winner of the grant. The grant is awarded to the applicant whose abstract describes the most original methodological contribution to the field of global health and whose summary demonstrates the greatest importance and potential impact in advancing the field.

Seye Abimbola is a health systems researcher from Nigeria. He is currently a senior lecturer at the School of Public Health, University of Sydney in Australia. He had his initial training in medicine at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife in Nigeria. And he gained his PhD from Sydney University in 2016, on a wide-ranging institutional analysis of primary health care governance in Nigeria. From 2018-2019, he was a Sidney Sax Overseas Early Career Fellow at the University of Oxford. He uses methods and theories from institutional economics to study community engagement in health governance, decentralised governance of health systems, and the role that governance plays in the adoption and scale-up of health system innovations. Abimbola is the Editor in Chief of BMJ Global Health. He is also a member of the Health System Governance Collaborative, which is part of the World Health Organisation (WHO), serves on the advisory council of Global Health 50/50 and holds the Prince Claus Chair.

Sophie is editor in chief of BMJ Medicine, head of clinical content at The BMJ and a general practitioner who trained and worked in the UK. Sophie has over 12 years of editorial experience at The BMJ where she ran the education and scholarly comment sections of the journal and worked as UK research editor. Sophie’s clinical interests are broad, but she is particularly passionate about improving the health of women and children, the effects of climate on health and promoting sustainable healthcare and the impact of social determinants of health. She has previously led The BMJ’s collections on climate action, universal health coverage and quality improvement in healthcare. Editorially, Sophie’s interests are improving diversity and inclusion in research and publication, minimising conflicts of interest, promoting partnership with patients and improving the dissemination of research.

Paul is a senior editor at The BMJ working on global health collections. He joined The BMJ in 2017 and previously worked as deputy editor of PLOS Medicine. Before working in publishing he was a research associate at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge. He received his PhD in Biological Sciences from the University of Birmingham in 2007 and his BSc in Biochemistry from the University of York in 2003.