Prof Karen Barnes, based at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, has served as the Head of the Pharmacology Group in WWARN since 2009 and now leads our Antimalarial Resistance Theme. 

Karen has thirty years of experience in translational clinical research to improve the treatment of P. falciparum malaria and evidence-based policy making nationally, regionally and internationally. 

Her main research interests include the comprehensive evaluation of malaria treatment policy changes and improving anti-malarial dosing regimens for vulnerable populations (young children, pregnant women and patients with HIV/AIDS or malnutrition) in order to delay drug resistance. 

Karen also coordinates the Mitigating Antimalarial Resistance Consortium for Southern and East Africa (MARC SE-Africa).

Associate Professor Rob Commons is an Infectious Diseases Physician in Ballarat, Australia and a Principal Research Fellow at the Menzies School of Health Research, Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia. His research focuses on optimising the radical cure of vivax malaria through data synthesis methods and he has led multiple WWARN study groups, undertaking individual patient data meta-analyses to improve the efficacy and safety of antimalarial treatment for Plasmodium vivax.

Dr Mehul Dhorda joined the WorldWide Antimalarial Research Network (WWARN) - now part of the IDDO network - in 2011 as a laboratory scientist and was Head of WWARN External Quality Assurance Programme, leading the laboratory activities for the WWARN Tracking Resistance to Artemisinin Collaboration Activities. He has extensive experience in molecular biology and also in clinical trials for tropical diseases in both Africa and Asia from his time spent working with Médecins Sans Frontières, Epicentre and University of Maryland School of Medicine. He serves as a member of WHO organised committees for quality assurance in malaria parasite detection and quantification. Mehul completed an MSc at Rutgers University, NJ, USA and holds a PhD in Molecular Parasitology from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in France.

Professor Paul Newton is Head of the IDDO Medicine Quality Research Group. He was appointed Head of the WorldWide Antimalarial Research Network (WWARN) Antimalarial Quality Group in 2010. He was the founding Director of the Lao-Oxford-Mahosot-Wellcome Trust Research Unit (LOMWRU) in the Microbiology Laboratory of Mahosot Hospital in Vientiane, Laos, from 2000 to 2019 and now works based from Oxford. After junior doctor training in infectious disease and internal medicine in the UK, he worked in the Mahidol Oxford Research Unit in Bangkok on malaria and melioidosis for four years before moving to Laos. 

Dr Céline Caillet joined IDDO as Scientific Coordinator of the Medicine Quality Research Group in 2015. She was appointed Research Scientist in 2016 and promoted to Deputy Head of the Research Group in 2020.

Céline is a pharmacist and former resident of the Hospital of Toulouse. She has taken part in several research projects on drug safety at the Center of Pharmacovigilance, Laboratory of Medical and Clinical Pharmacology of Toulouse, France. Following her MSc in Epidemiology and Public Health in Bordeaux, France, Céline completed her PhD in drug safety in Laos. During her PhD, Céline also taught pharmacology in the Department of Pharmacy at the University of Health Sciences, Vientiane.

She is particularly interested in the epidemiology of substandard and falsified medicines and testing the performances of screening technologies for early detection of substandard and falsified medicines.

Makoto is an infectious disease physician and a clinical epidemiologist. Since joining WWARN/IDDO in 2015, he has worked on malaria in pregnancy, supporting the 2022 revision of the WHO malaria treatment guidelines to recommend artemether-lumefantrine for women in their first trimester.

His research interests extend broadly to the epidemiology of clinical infectious diseases, including nosocomial bacterial infections and antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Currently, his research focuses on evidence synthesis related to AMR, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, to support evidence-based actions against AMR where data is limited.

He completed his DPhil at the Nuffield Department of Medicine, Oxford (2015-2019, Clarendon Scholar, NDM Graduate Prize 2019). He earned an MD from the University of Tokyo, as well as an MSc in Tropical Medicine and International Health and an MSc in Epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He is a certified epidemiologist and infectious disease specialist in Japan and a fellow of the Japanese Society of Internal Medicine. He is a Wolfson College Research Fellow in Sciences.

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Prof Joel Tarning was appointed Head of Pharmacometrics at the WorldWide Antimalarial Research Network (WWARN) - part of the IDDO network - in 2014. He applies pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic modelling to optimise antimalarial drug therapy through large pooled pharmacometric analyses. He has been an active member of WWARN since 2009 and led the Pharmacology Proficiency Programme for 2 years. Joel has extensive experience in the field of Clinical Pharmacology, is a Professor of Clinical Pharmacology at Oxford University,  and is heading the Clinical Pharmacology Department at Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Research Unit, Thailand. His main research focuses on infectious disease pharmacology, especially in pregnant women and children. Joel received the European Federation for Pharmaceutical Sciences (EUFEPS)Giorgio Segré Prize for pharmaceutical research in June 2015.