GHRG GI Directors
Professor Nigel Cunliffe - GHRG GI Director
Nigel Cunliffe is Professor of Medical Microbiology at the University of Liverpool. He is Director of the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Health Protection Research Unit in Gastrointestinal Infections, and Director of the NIHR Global Health Research Group in Gastrointestinal Infections at the University of Liverpool. He is an active clinician, working as Honorary Consultant Microbiologist at Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust. Following graduation from the University of Manchester Medical School in 1988, Nigel trained as a clinical microbiologist in Edinburgh and Liverpool and obtained his PhD from the University of Liverpool in 2001. His research addresses the epidemiology and prevention of diarrhoeal disease in children. Since the award in 1996 of a Wellcome Trust Research Training Fellowship in Clinical Tropical Medicine, Nigel has led a long-term programme of rotavirus research in children in Malawi. He led a pivotal, Phase III clinical trial of human rotavirus vaccine which informed a global rotavirus vaccine recommendation by WHO, and he demonstrated for the first time from a low income country that rotavirus vaccination reduces diarrhoea deaths in children. His work has been published in leading medical journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, Lancet Infectious Diseases and Lancet Global Health. In 2022 he received an NIHR Senior Investigator Award in recognition of his contribution to applied health research and training in the UK and globally.
Associate Professor Chisomo Msefula - GHRG GI Co-Director
Chisomo Msefula is an Associate Professor of Medical Microbiology at the Kamuzu University of Health Sciences, in Blantyre Malawi and co-Director of the National Institute for Health Research Global Health Research Group on Gastrointestinal Infections. He also serves as the Head of the Microbiology Unit at the Kamuzu University of Health Sciences. He previously served as Senate representative on the Council of the University of Malawi (2017 – 2019). He has extensive experience in the development of both undergraduate and postgraduate academic programmes. He is also an organiser and Instructor on the African version of the Wellcome Trust’s Advanced Course, ‘molecular approaches to clinical microbiology’. As a research scientist he has dedicated over 17 years of investigations into the aspects of pathogenesis of invasive salmonellosis and other enteric infections. His work was ground breaking and led to understanding that invasive nontyphoidal salmonella in sub-Saharan Africa is distinct from other well characterised diarrhoeal salmonella. He has also collaborated on efforts aimed at tackling the problem of typhoid through burden of disease studies and the evaluation of typhoid conjugate vaccine, which has recently received GAVI support for national roll-out. He has published his work in Journals including, Nature Genetics, Genome Research, Lancet Infectious Diseases, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases and Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy. He has successfully mentored and supervised masters students, PhD and Postdoctoral students who have progressed in their research careers. Chisomo holds a PhD from the University of Liverpool, obtained in December 2009.