Wolfson DPhil Student wins Young Investigator Award

Final year DPhil student Randolph Ngwafor Anye, was presented with the prestigious award during his attendance at this year’s Joint International Tropical Medicine Meeting in Bangkok, Thailand, a conference bringing together hundreds of researchers and experts in the field of Tropical Medicine from more than 50 different countries.

Randolph, a student in Clinical Medicine at the Nuffield Department of Medicine, presented work that forms a substantive component of his DPhil research, focusing on the optimisation of malaria control and strategic resource allocation. His doctoral research has been dedicated to the development of a novel modelling framework designed to identify optimal resource allocation strategies for malaria interventions in Cameroon. A principal aim of this model was to account for heterogeneity in implementation contexts, with particular emphasis on reaching geographically isolated populations and safeguarding clinically vulnerable groups, including children under five years and pregnant women. The outputs of this analysis provided an evidence-based framework for enhancing the efficiency and equity of malaria control and elimination efforts within a constrained budget.

Given the current climate of significant reduction in global health financing – with profound implications for malaria-endemic regions – the application of this work has shown to be even more relevant now. These findings not only offer a blueprint for maximising impact under budget constraints but also reveal critical projections of the potential human cost of funding shortfalls, including estimates of avoidable excess mortality.