Our People

Prof Nick Day

Fellow, Ordinary Fellow

Professor of Tropical Medicine and Global Health; Director, Mahidol Tropical Medicine Research Unit

Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine

I joined the University of Oxford in 1991 as the director of the Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Unit (now OUCRU) in Vietnam, where I conducted clinical studies in malaria, tetanus, diphtheria, dengue, and typhoid. On return to the UK I studied staphylococcal disease as a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellow (1997 to 2002), and was Deputy Director of the Centre for Tropical Medicine at Oxford from 1999 to 2003. Since 2003 I have been Director of the Wellcome funded Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU), based in Thailand, and its regional network of research units and study sites. The Network conducts clinical and laboratory research on malaria, melioidosis, leptospirosis, rickettsial infections, and other communicable diseases afflicting rural populations throughout Asia and beyond. We also help train the next generation of researchers in the countries where we work, and have a large postgraduate training programme hosting around 80 PhD/DPhil and Masters students.

We now work in 12 countries, operating from eight permanent research units, and conduct collaborative research at 50 clinical study sites across Asia and Africa. My particular interest is in leveraging MORU’s research network to increase the power of our clinical trials and the generalizability of the results obtained. The resulting multi-centre, multicountry studies in malaria, melioidosis, rickettsial infections, sepsis, and undifferentiated fever have played a major role in recent research output and in our future plans.