Joy is a Ugandan-born, British-trained paediatrician/neonatal clinician and perinatal epidemiologist with 30 years’ experience especially in sub-Saharan Africa including: clinical care, measurement and burden estimates, implementation/evaluation of maternal, newborn and child health. Her paediatric/neonatal training was in the UK, followed by teaching, implementation and research, mainly living in Africa. Her MPH was from Emory, Atlanta, USA, whilst at CDC, and her PhD at Institute of Child Health, London. For 10 years, she was Director of Evidence and Policy for the Gates funded Saving Newborn Lives/Save the Children. She has been a professor at LSHTM since 2012, and was Director of the MARCH Centre (Maternal Adolescent Reproductive & Child Health) from 2013-2023 seeing growth from 200 to over 500 academics. 

Her main contribution to global health has been developing the evidence-base to measure and reduce the global burden of 2.3 million neonatal deaths, 2 million stillbirths, and 13.4 million preterm births, including informing Sustainable Development Goal targets. She has published >450 peer-reviewed papers including leading several influential Lancet series, with wide media and policy uptake. H-index ~140 and has been in the top 1% of cited scientists for a decade. She is Co-Chair of the Lancet Commission on Implementation and Evidence in Global Health.

She is a champion for equitable and diverse research leadership, and has supervised many PhDs and post-docs. Joy is one of the few women nominated to membership of both UK Academy of Medical Sciences and USA National Academy of Medicine. She has served on many WHO committees, inclduing STAGE, Global Statistics, Group B Step and been part of Every Newborn/EWENE leadership team since 2014.