Professor Paul Milligan

Professor Paul Milligan is an epidemiologist and biostatistician working on the control of malaria and other infectious diseases. He trained initially in biology and ecology, followed by a PhD in population biology, and then a Wellcome Trust post-doctoral fellowship in biomathematics at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine helped him to switch focus to epidemiology and biostatistics. He worked as a statistician/epidemiologist at the MRC laboratories in The Gambia for 8 years, during which time he contributed to evaluation of the introduction of Hib conjugate vaccine showing its effectiveness, and to the first field trials showing the efficacy of the RTS,S vaccine. Since 2004 he has been based in the faculty of Epidemiology and Population Health in the London School of Hygiene&Tropical Medicine, where he teaches statistics and epidemiology on the short courses and distance learning programmes, and he co-organises a distance learning MSc module in the epidemiology of infectious diseases. He has benefited from long term partnerships with researchers in the Universities of Cheikh Anta Diop and Thiès in Senegal, as well as with colleagues at LSHTM, on field studies of malaria control, and with the National University of Singapore, on statistical and epidemiological methods in infectious disease research. He led the public health evaluation of the scale-up of seasonal malaria chemoprevention in West Africa, showing its effectiveness, and he contributed to the large-scale evaluation of the introduction of the RTYS,S vaccine in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi, which was recently completed, showing the vaccine’s impact in reducing mortality in young children, and he is involved in partnerships in West and Central Africa for implementation research to improve delivery and uptake of malaria vaccines.