APPOINTMENT OF IFAKARA CHIEF EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Dr. Honorati Masanja - Designated Chief Executive Director The Board of Trustees of the Ifakara Health Institute (IHI) is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Honorati Masanja as the Chief Executive Director (CED) of Ifakara Health Institute effective July 2016. Dr. Masanja takes over from Dr. Salim Abdulla whose term is coming to an end; before end of his term Dr. Salim will be on sabbatical level from July through December 2016. Dr. Salim Abdulla remains to be among the successful leaders of IHI for his seven (7) years of leadership during which IHI has registered tremendous milestones to becoming a center of excellence in the region. A 1992 graduate of University of Dar es Salaam, where he majored in mathematics and statistics, Dr. Masanja went on to receive a MSc in biostatistics from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of London in 1995. He later joined the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute of the University of Basel in Switzerland and earned his PhD in Epidemiology in 2006.

 

Dr Masanja has over twenty years (20) of professional experience in designing and conducting clinical trials and managing various intervention trials and evaluation system wide maternal, newborn and child health programs. He successfully established the Rufiji Health and Demographic Surveillance System for evaluating health system interventions and the Sentinel Panel of Districts; a national platform for evaluating health sector performance. He was a team member that developed the District Health Accounts (DHA) tool as part of the Tanzania Essential Health Interventions Project (TEHIP) which is incorporated in the Planning and Reporting Tool (PlanRep2), now used by districts for planning and resource allocation. He has led the scientists at the Institute to win numerous grants as director of research division during the past 7 years. Dr. Masanja a member of several technical working groups including the Ministry of Health Monitoring and Evaluation and eHealth Steering committee and sits in the board of Management and Development for Health (MDH). In the past, Masanja has served as a board member of the International Network of Demographic Evaluations of Populations and Their Health (INDEPTH) Network based in Accra, Ghana, Consortium for Advanced Research Training in Africa (CARTA) He has co-authored over 70 publications in the peer reviewed journals, edited four book chapters and supervised numerous MSc students. Dr. Masanja is a reviewer of the MRC Joint Health Systems Research Initiative and in a number of journals including Plos Medicine, Health Policy and Planning and the International Journal of Epidemiology. Dr. Masanja was appointed as an Adjunct Professor in the School of Life Sciences at the Nelson Mandela African Institute of Science and Technology in 2013. As new leader, Dr Masanja will be driving IHI to achieve its dream of becoming a world class research and knowledge institution producing world class data and evidence, and linking research chain to innovations, product development, and decision for programming and policy. Dr. Hassan Mshinda (PhD) Chairperson, Board of Trustees 21st March, 2016