The Faculty is delighted to announce the appointment of the new Course Director: please welcome Stephanie Simmonds, OBE.

Stephanie Simmonds first worked in a humanitarian setting with the NGO Oxfam in the Ethiopian famine of 1974. She then worked in a number of conflicts, refugee and other humanitarian crises and also in health development including for example, as senior health adviser to the UK Government in what was the Overseas Development Administration (ODA) now the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office, as World Health Organization (WHO) Senior Health Coordinator in the Office of the UN Assistant Secretary General during the 1985 famine in Ethiopia on secondment from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), as the WHO Special Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina during the conflict 1993-1995 on secondment from ODA; and as an expert on on global committees such as the Global Fund, Gavi, and UNITAID; until finally working 2015 – 2019 in Afghanistan as senior adviser to the minister of public health.

Her research and publications were mainly during a ten year period working at the LSHTM. Firsts at the School included the editing of the first ever textbook on refugee community health published by Oxford University Press, directing the first ever international course on refugee health, and establishing the first ever WHO Collaborating Centre for the Health of Refugees and other Displaced Persons.

Stephanie was an examiner for the DMCC 2005 to 2019; and was the guest speaker for the 2014 Spring Lecture ‘Humanitarian aid – One person’s perspective from experience as a donor, UN and NGO stakeholder’.