Dr Mark Palmer takes over from Prof. Hannah Akuffo as EDCTP General Assembly Chairperson
Dr Mark Palmer (Medical Research Council (MRC), United Kingdom) is the new Chairperson of the EEIG-EDCTP General Assembly (GA) as of January 2014. He takes over from Professor Hannah Akuffo (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), Sweden).
Prof. Akuffo was elected as Chairperson of the EDCTP General Assembly in 2010. The General Assembly and the Executive Director expressed their gratitude for her dedication to EDCTP and her hard work during the years that the programme came to its full maturity, while EDCTP started preparing for the second programme as well.
Dr Stefano Vella (Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS), Italy) and Dr Detlef Böcking (Projektträger im Deutschen Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (PT-DLR, Project Management Agency), Germany) were elected as the new Vice-Chairpersons.
“It is an honour to have been elected by the members of the General Assembly to be their chair as we move into the next phase of EDCTP under horizon2020. This is therefore an exciting time to be taking over from Prof. Hannah Akuffo, who has been an excellent chair over the last 4 years.””
Dr Mark Palmer, new chair of the EDCTP General Assembly
Dr Palmer stated that EDCTP has developed, under the Directorship of Prof. Charles Mgone, into an internationally recognised platform of collaboration between researchers in Europe and Africa. With the strong support of the European Commission, EDCTP2 will be able to build on this platform to deliver the objective of developing new and improved drugs, vaccines, microbicides and diagnostics against HIV, TB malaria and the most neglected infectious diseases.
Mark Palmer joined the Medical Research Council’s Research Management Group in 1999 and in 2002 became the programme manager responsible for global infections research, managing MRC’s Units in the Gambia and Uganda. In 2006 he was appointed Director of International Strategy where he is responsible for MRC’s international policy and coordination of global health strategy. He is chairman of the Governing Council of the International Agency for Research in Cancer and has been the UK lead for the Health Theme of the European Commission’s Framework Programme 7 and will be the lead for health in Horizon 2020.
Dr Palmer has a background in biomedical research. He graduated in Biochemistry from the University of Oxford where he also completed his doctorate on the murine immune response to influenza. Before joining the MRC Dr Palmer’s 11 years of post-doctoral work included studies on the genetics of sex-determination at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, Prion Diseases at St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School and as a lecturer at Imperial College, London, working on Alzheimer’s disease.
EDCTP General Assembly
EDCTP is governed by the General Assembly (GA), in which all member countries are represented. It is the ultimate and exclusive decision making body of the European Economic Interest Group (EEIG)-EDCTP, the legal entity for implementing the programme and managing the funding. The GA’s Chairperson and Vice-Chairpersons are elected every two years.