Debra Jackson joined LSHTM as the inaugural Takeda Chair in Global Child Health and Deputy Director of the MARCH Centre in August 2020.

Previously she held the position of Senior Health Advisor and Chief of the Implementation Research and Delivery Science Unit, Health Section, UNICEF, which focused on maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health programme research, data and digital health. She also holds an appointment as an Extraordinary Professor in Public Health at the School of Public Health (SoPH), University of the Western Cape (UWC), South Africa. She lived in South Africa from 2000-2013 and has experience working across Africa, Asia, Pacific Islands and the USA. At the SoPH she served as principal investigator for a range of research projects, such as the multi-country PROMISE-EBF trial on promoting exclusive breastfeeding and the National South African Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission of HIV Evaluation. She has qualifications in nursing, public health, epidemiology and biostatistics. Her research interests are maternal and child health, nutrition, CRVS, health systems, embedded implementation research, MCH data and digital health. Her recent research has focused on prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, infant feeding, birth registration, maternal and newborn health and community health workers. She has 140 peer-reviewed publications and serves on several global and WHO advisory committees.