Professor Kathryn Maitland

FMedSc, OBE

Professor Kathryn Maitland FMedSc, OBE is a Professor of Paediatric Tropical Infectious Diseases at the Faculty of Medicine and Director of the ICARE Centre at the Global Centre of Health Innovation, Imperial College, London. As a paediatrician, based full time in East Africa for 24 years, her work focuses on emergency care research as a highly targeted and cost-effective means of tackling childhood mortality in resource-limited hospitals in sub-Saharan Africa. She has generated the essential evidence for basic therapies such as fluids, transfusions, and oxygen, for supporting critically ill children. Her large Phase III trials have helped clinical decision making, change policy and ultimately reduced child mortality.  

She is a member of a number WHO Technical advisory boards and other international bodies/round table discussion groups. She has sat on a number  of grant funding bodies including at Wellcome and MRC and  EDCTP and NIHR as chair. She was elected to the Academy of Medical Sciences as fellow in 2016 and to the Council in 2022. In 2022 she was awarded an OBE for her services to medicine. 

Her leadership and engagement within her multidisciplinary team has resulted in a substantial output in terms of professional development and the nurturing of the next generation of African and European clinician scientists. She has always championed a positive approach for female scientists, as evidenced by her portfolio of PhD and higher degree students and the coinvestigators involved in clinical trials have included a strong positive female: male ratio.