Visiting Scholar, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Research Team
Ruwan is a field epidemiologist with considerable experience in humanitarian contexts and with displaced populations. He advocates for and conducts research to improve the standards of public health for crisis-affected communities. His current focus is on merging field investigation and modern analytical methods to improve outbreak and humanitarian response models. He recently completed a PhD in epidemiology and mathematical modelling as a Doctoral Foreign Scholar at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, in collaboration with Epicentre-Médecins Sans Frontières. He evaluated the effects of targeted interventions for cholera outbreaks in fragile settings using mathematical modeling and observational studies.
Prior to this, Ruwan was the Senior Epidemiologist for the International Rescue Committee (IRC), providing technical support in humanitarian settings, primarily in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, and for the Syria crisis. He covered multiple areas, as NGO epidemiologists tend to do, including conflict and public health situation analysis, surveillance and outbreak response (Ebola, cholera, etc.), community health and primary care, noncommunicable disease management, and mortality estimation. He was also the Editor-in-Chief of Conflict and Health. Ruwan has also worked for the World Health Organization (WHO) in Haiti and South Sudan, International Organization for Migration in Vietnam, and he trained as an FETP fellow with the Canadian Field Epidemiology Program of the Public Health Agency of Canada.
Ruwan has published widely both research and public health guidance, including recently on cholera in The Lancet Infectious Diseases and on guidelines for early warning alert and response systems in emergencies for the WHO. In addition to his PhD, he has a MHS from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a BSc (Hons) from the University of Toronto.
Themes | Global Health & Humanitarianism |
Status | Active |
Events |
|
Related Work |
N/A
|
Updates |
You may also be interested in...
Hot off the Press – New Opinion Article Publication: DATA: A Key for Unlocking Quality in WASH Programming
A new article has been authored by experts from the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research and collaborators from mWater, the Mortenson Center, Aquaya Institute, Global Water Challenge, and ETH Zurich. The paper, titled Challenges ...Read more about this Post
New Research Presented at EGU and EEHF
This past month, Dahdaleh Global Health Graduate Scholar, Michael De Santi, presented his newest research “ML-QMRA: A novel machine learning tool for linking water quality to health risk in humanitarian contexts” at the European Geosciences ...Read more about this Post
2025 Year in Review
Thank you for your continued support, engagement, and invaluable contributions to our global health research community here at the Dahdaleh Institute. Happy holidays and cheers to a new year! 1. Centering Palestinian Voices: Rethinking Global ...Read more about this Post