SSACAB Co‑Principal Investigator – Professor David Macleod

SSACAB Wits, the lead institution, recently hosted Professor David MacLeod, Associate Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, U. of London (LSHTM) and one of the consortium’s Northern partners. LSHTM is one of SSACAB’s two Northern partners and plays an essential role in helping the consortium expand advanced biostatistics training, co-supervision, and mentorship across sub-Saharan Africa.

Professor MacLeod is a statistician in the International Statistics and Epidemiology Group at LSHTM, with extensive experience supporting large multi-country public health studies. Much of his current work focuses on the International Centre for Eye Health, where he contributes to research aimed at preventing avoidable blindness in low- and middle-income countries. He has previously worked on major HIV and population-level interventions, including serving as a statistician on the PopART cluster-randomised trial on Universal Testing and Treatment. His additional work in maternal and newborn health has examined how public and private health systems shape outcomes for women and infants. Across these areas, his approach has emphasised rigorous study design, robust statistical methods, and relevance to real-world health system challenges. His visit to Wits reinforced the consortium's model of Northern and Southern partners collaboration. The health problems facing the continent, such as HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, emerging infections and the growing burden of non-communicable diseases, are global in nature, but local contexts shape how the health challenges are tackled.

The collaboration allows African researchers to draw on international expertise in advanced methods, while Northern partners gain invaluable insights from African data, diverse populations, and unique implementation environments. This collaboration strengthens methodological innovation, makes research more responsive to local needs, and ensures that statistical solutions are co-created rather than imposed from the outside. On this visit, Macleod’s discussions with MSc, PhD, and postdoctoral fellows highlighted the value of collaborative problem-solving, from refining study design to improving the interpretation of complex datasets. He also emphasised the importance of biostatistics as a backbone of evidence-informed policy, reminding early-career researchers that high-quality data and methods are essential for tackling entrenched health inequities.