About | May Measurement Month

MMM Trustees

Professor Neil Poulter FMedSci

Professor of Preventive Cardiovascular Medicine, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom

Professor Neil Poulter FMedSci

Professor of Preventive Cardiovascular Medicine, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom

Neil qualified at St Mary’s Hospital in 1974, following which, he trained in General medicine. He spent five years in Kenya co-ordinating a collaborative hypertension research programme at the Wellcome Trust Research Laboratories in Nairobi. In 1985 he gained an MSc in Epidemiology with distinction at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. In 1997 he was appointed Professor of Preventive Cardiovascular Medicine at Imperial College London. In 2008, Neil was elected as one of the inaugural Senior Investigators of the NIHR and as a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences the following year, in 2009. He held the position of President of the British Hypertension Society from 2003-2005 and also President of the International Society of Hypertension from 2016-2018.

An Honorary Consultant Physician and Epidemiologist at the Peart-Rose (CVD Prevention) Clinic based at Hammersmith Hospital, London, Neil is also Co-Pl of the WHO Oral Contraceptive case-control Study at University College London Medical School. He is currently co-Director of the International Centre for Circulatory Health and Director of the Imperial Clinical Trials Unit and has also held a senior management role in several international trials including the ASCOT, ADVANCE, EXSCEL, DEVOTE LEADER and CREOLE trials. Neil has published over 650 papers in peer-reviewed medical journals, including co-authoring several sets of national and international guidelines and has been identified as being among the top 1% most cited academics in clinical medicine in 2014 (Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher report) and among the top 0.1% most cited researcher between 2008-2018 (Web of Science Group Highly Cited Researcher 2019 and 2020 report). Neil is the Chief Investigator of the May Measurement Month.

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Professor Alta Schutte PhD FRSSAf FESC ISHF

Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine, University of New South Wales, Australia

Professor Alta Schutte PhD FRSSAf FESC ISHF

Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine, University of New South Wales, Australia

Alta Schutte is Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine and Principal Theme Lead of Cardiac, Vascular and Metabolic Medicine at the University of New South Wales, and The George Institute for Global Health in Sydney, Australia. She is also Honorary Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand and the North-West University, South Africa.

Alta’s research interest is the early detection, prevention and effective management of hypertension, where she has led many population and clinical studies, such as the SAfrEIC, POWIRS, and African-PREDICT studies. In 2008 she was the Founding Director of the Hypertension in Africa Research Team (HART) and established the Medical Research Council Unit for Hypertension and Cardiovascular Disease in South Africa in 2015. She served as President of the Southern African Hypertension Society from 2014 to 2016. Since relocating to Australia in 2020 she leads projects focused on improved blood pressure monitoring and blood pressure control.

Alta is an invited author of the Lancet Commission on Hypertension, and of the World Health Organization’s Technical Specifications Report for Automated Non-Invasive Blood Pressure Measuring Devices. She is an Executive Board member of STRIDE BP, an international scientific non-profit organization with the mission of improving the accuracy of blood pressure measurement and diagnosis of hypertension. Since 2017 she contributed to the establishment of May Measurement Month and continues to contribute to the global awareness campaign as a Trustee.

She was President of the International Society of Hypertension (2018-2020) during which time she initiated the development of the 2020 ISH Global Hypertension Practice Guidelines for low and high resource settings.

Alta has contributed to over >400 publications in the field of hypertension (Google H-index 65, >75,000 citations) and ranks in the top 0.019% of 250,197 authors in the field ‘blood pressure (BP)’ (Expertscape) and #15 worldwide when ranked by FWCIs (SciVal) in the Cluster “Hypertension; BP”.

Alta is associated Editor of Hypertension, Hypertension Research and the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, and editorial board member of all major hypertension journals.

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Professor Markus Schlaich

President, High Blood Pressure Research Council of Australia

Professor Markus Schlaich

President, High Blood Pressure Research Council of Australia

Markus Schlaich is a renal physician and a European Society of Hypertension (ESH) accredited hypertension specialist. He is an International Society of Hypertension (ISH) Fellow and has been on the Executive Committee of the ISH from 2018-2020 acting as Treasurer and Chair of the Asia-Pacific Regional Advisory Group. He currently serves on the Management Board of the global ISH May Measurement Month campaign. Markus is President of the High Blood Pressure Research Council of Australia and a Trustee of the Foundation for High Blood Pressure Research.

Markus has a strong background in clinical research with a focus on the pathophysiology of hypertension, involvement of the kidneys, and hypertension mediated organ damage. He has a specific interest in treatment modalities targeting the sympathetic nervous system and is a founding member of the ESH Working Group on Interventional Treatment of Hypertension. For his work he received the Björn Folkow Award from the ESH and the Arthur C. Corcoran Award from the AHA Hypertension Council, both in 2021. He has authored more than 400 articles and book chapters in peer reviewed journals and serves on the Editorial Board of Hypertension and Journal of Hypertension.

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Professor George S. Stergiou, MD, PhD, FRCP

Professor of Medicine & Hypertension Hypertension Center STRIDE-7 (EU), University of Athens,Greece.

Professor George S. Stergiou, MD, PhD, FRCP

Professor of Medicine & Hypertension Hypertension Center STRIDE-7 (EU), University of Athens,Greece.

George is the President of the International Society of Hypertension, Chairman of STRIDE BP International Organization on Blood Pressure (BP) measurement methodology and technology (www.stridebp.org), Past Chairman of the European Society of Hypertension Working Group on BP Monitoring & Cardiovascular Variability, an ISO Committee Member on BP monitoring equipment, and an Executive Committee member of the International Paediatric Hypertension Association. His research work has focused on BP monitoring methodology, technology development and validation, hypertension diagnostics, hypertension epidemiology, control; paediatric hypertension, and antihypertensive drug action. He has authored 430 PubMed articles with h-index 90 and Google Scholar citations >75,000.

Dr Thomas Beaney MSc MRCP MRCGP

Academic General Practitioner, Imperial College London, United Kingdom

Dr Thomas Beaney MSc MRCP MRCGP

Academic General Practitioner, Imperial College London, United Kingdom

Thomas is a GP and Clinical Research Fellow in the Department of Primary Care and Public Health at Imperial College London. He has been part of the May Measurement Month campaign since 2017 as lead statistician.

Thomas studied Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge before qualifying in Medicine at Imperial College London in 2013 and completing clinical training as a GP in 2021. In 2015 he was awarded a National Institute for Health Research scholarship to complete an MSc in Medical Statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, graduating with Distinction. His research focuses on hypertension and cardiovascular disease epidemiology, global and digital health and health services research. Thomas is currently completing a PhD at Imperial College exploring patterns of multimorbidity using machine learning approaches, funded by the Wellcome Trust.

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David Somen

Managing Director of Virtual IT, London

David Somen

Managing Director of Virtual IT, London

David is a businessman from a medical family and with roots in the developing world. In his day job, he is the Managing Director of Virtual IT, an IT managed services provider based in London, UK as well as serving as Chairman and Board Director respectively for two family businesses based in Kenya – Eldama Technologies Limited another IT services business and Serenity Spa, Kenya’s leading health and beauty spas with three branches location around Nairobi. In addition to Virtual / Eldama / Serenity, David serves on the board and is the Chairman of the Governance Committee of Cim Finance Limited in Mauritius, and also chairs the board of Cim’s Kenya subsidiary, Aspira. He is also an advisor to Enasoit Ranch Limited, a nature conservancy based in Laikipia, Kenya.

David’s background includes a number of entrepreneurial technology start ups, including AccessKenya Group Limited, Kenya’s leading corporate internet service provider which was listed on the Nairobi Stock Exchange prior to being sold to a subsidiary of Japan’s NTT Corporation and LCR Telecom Group, a telecom services company which was sold to a NASDAQ listed group. David was a founder of both business and respectively Deputy Chairman and Group CEO. Prior to these businesses, he worked for McKinsey & Co. David has a Law degree from Oxford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

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MMM Advisory Board

Professor Karen Sliwa

Director: Cape Heart Institute, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Cape Town, South AfricaProfessor: Division of Cardiology, Department of Medicine, Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape Town, South Africa

Professor Karen Sliwa

Prof. Karen Sliwa is the Director of the Cape Heart Institute, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Cape Town- a translational cardiovascular research Institute with 8 distinct research groups.

She is on a joint appointment as senior cardiologist working at the Division of Cardiology, Department of Medicine, Groote Schuur Hospital, University of Cape Town and at UCT Private Academic Hospital. Her special areas of expertise are heart failure, structural heart diseases such as cardiomyopathy and cardiac disease in pregnancy.

Prof. Sliwa is widely recognised as a world expert in cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), with a special interest in reducing mortality in women with cardiac disease in maternity. She has contributed to better understanding on the pathophysiology, treatment options and awareness of peripartum cardiomyopathy (PPCM), a global disease particularly prevalent in African populations.

She led and still leads several inter-Africa and global research projects, which have had a major impact for creating knowledge about CVDs common in Africa and other Middle-to-Lower income regions, leading to changes in policy. Her considerable experience in setting up simple, cost-effective registries and web-based data entry platforms have had a major impact on planning several innovative research projects and has facilitated the training of physicians from several African countries, including Mozambique, Nigeria, Cameroon, Uganda and Tanzania. Her translational research from bench-bed-to-population studies have led to a much better understanding of CVDs such as rheumatic heart disease and heart failure due to various causes and subsequently to improved patient care.

She holds numerous awards such as the German Cardiac Society Paul Morawitz Award for Exceptional Cardiovascular Research ( 2013), a Honorary Doctorate University Diderot-Sorbonne, Paris, France (2017), European Cardiac Society Geoffrey Rose Award for Population Sciences ( 2019) and the South African Medical Research Council Gold award ( 2021) and the University of Cape Town Alan Pifer Award for Research Excellence. She has authored more than 450 publications, trained more then 30 post graduate students. Her work is highly cited ( H- index 108; > 120 000 citations).

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Professor Tazeen Hasan Jafar

Professor, Health Services and Systems Research Signature Research Programme, Duke-NUS Medical School Other Affiliations: Chair of Global Health Partnerships, International Society for Hypertension Visiting Consultant Renal Medicine, Singapore General Hospital Visiting Professor of Medicine, Aga Khan University, Pakistan Research Professor, Duke Global Health Institute, USA

Professor Tazeen Hasan Jafar

Professor Tazeen H. Jafar is a distinguished physician scientist and global health leader with a tenured position in the Program in Health Services and Systems Research at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore. Her expertise extends globally, with key roles as a Visiting Consultant Renal Medicine at Singapore General Hospital, a Visiting Professor of Medicine at Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan, and a Consultant Nephrologist at Durham VA Healthcare System. Simultaneously, she holds a Professorship at Duke Global Health Institute, Duke University, in Durham, NC, USA.

Dr. Jafar’s academic journey began at Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan, where she completed medical school. Following this, she pursued a residency in Medicine-Pediatrics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, achieving dual board certification. Subsequently, she completed a fellowship in clinical nephrology, earning board certification in Nephrology, and clinical research at Tufts Medical Center in Boston. Additionally, she holds a master’s in public health from Harvard University.

With a career spanning over 25 years, Professor Jafar is recognized for her pioneering research in chronic non-communicable diseases in global health settings. Serving as the chief principal investigator and executive director of the COBRA-BPS trial, conducted across Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, her work published in the New England Journal of Medicine demonstrated the effectiveness of a community health worker-led intervention in controlling blood pressure. This landmark study has significant implications for scalability and affordability in low- and middle-income countries.

Professor Jafar also directs the SingHypertension and SKOPE trials in Singapore, focusing on enhancing hypertension and kidney disease care. She is leading feasibility studies to evaluate adaptation of similar approaches in rural North Carolina.

Recognized for her impactful contributions, Professor Jafar received the 2012 Boehringer Ingelheim Developing World Award from the International Society of Hypertension. As a dedicated mentor, she guides numerous trainees, including MD, MS, and Ph.D. students.

She serves on the editorial board on prestigious scientific journals. She regularly participates in policy forums addressing non-communicable diseases, collaborating with organizations like the WHO and local governments in South Asia. Serving as the deputy chair of the UK-MRC Applied Global Health Research Board, Professor Jafar continues to contribute significantly to the advancement of global health.

Despite her extensive research commitments, Professor Jafar maintains an active clinical practice as a nephrologist, exemplifying her commitment to bridging the gap between research and patient care. Her multifaceted roles and global impact underscore her position as a leader in the field, driving transformative change in healthcare and research.

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