Second Meeting of the DS-I Africa Consortium
29 October -2 November 2022

Prof Matthew Chersich (Participant)

Matthew Chersich is Research Professor at Wits and a Visiting Professor at the University of Ghent, Belgium. His career spans more than 20 years working in public health research in Africa, and with WHO and other international organisations. He spent the past 10 years working at Wits RHI, and previously with the Centre for Health Policy and at the Perinatal HIV Research Unit at Wits University.
Matthew's training encompassed medicine at Wits University where he completed his MBBCh in 1998, public health Masters at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and doctoral studies at the University of Ghent in Belgium. He sees the medical profession as an opportunity to work in interesting environments, having worked in Durban, South Africa; London UK; Geneva Switzerland; Mombasa, Kenya; Ghent, Belgium; and Assisi, Italy. He maintains close links with WHO, having contributed to 14 WHO guidelines or monologues. He was a contributing author to the Africa chapter of the 6th Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. His work on climate change centers on assessing the impacts of climate change on maternal and newborn health, adaptation interventions and climate activism. He is leading the NIH HEAT Center, a new data science initiative across Africa within the NIH DSI-Africa programme, co-leading the CHAMNHA project on heat and maternal health and part of the two large EU grants on climate change and health, To date he has authored around 200 publications with an H Index of 53.