Merton welcomes Visiting AfOx Senior Research Fellow Dr Stephen Kennedy

We are very much looking forward to welcoming Dr Stephen B Kennedy to the College in January, as our first Senior AfOx Visiting Fellow. 

The Africa Oxford Initiative (AfOx) is a cross-University platform which aims to facilitate equitable and sustainable collaborations between researchers based at the University of Oxford and African universities, and increase the number of African students pursuing postgraduate degrees in Oxford. The Senior Visiting Fellowships programme allows outstanding African researchers to spend up to a year at the University, and it is a great pleasure that we have the opportunity to partner with AfOx, to welcome Senior Fellows into our College community.

Our first Senior Visiting Fellow, Dr Stephen B Kennedy, is from Liberia and trained in general medicine, infectious disease epidemiology, international health and biomedical research in Liberia, the United States, and Zambia, respectively. Dr Kennedy possesses over 15 years of experience as a public health practitioner, infectious disease researcher, and medical doctor, and serves as mentor to young Liberian investigators.

Previously, Dr Kennedy served as Commissioner for Programs & Policy at the National AIDS Commission of Liberia; Secretary General of the Liberia College of Physicians & Surgeons, the country’s flagship postgraduate medical residency training programme; and Co-ordinator for Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) Research at Liberia’s Incident Management System during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Dr Kennedy also served as Liberia’s Co-Principal Investigator on the EVD Vaccine Clinical Trial for the Liberia-US Joint Partnership for Research on Ebola Vaccines in Liberia and for a four-country (Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia, Mali) three-sponsors (NIH, INSERM, LSHTM) EVD Vaccines Clinical Trial Consortium.

While he spends time with us, Dr Kennedy will be working on “strengthening research ethics committees in Liberia for genomic studies”. We are also delighted that he will be able to interact with our Fellows, staff and students, bringing his wealth of experience in global health and infectious disease and broadening the perspective of our community.