Anthony Scott

Anthony Scott BA BM BCh MSc FRCP DTM&H FMedSci is a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow in Clinical Science at the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme in Kilifi, Kenya, and Professor of Vaccine Epidemiology in the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) in London, UK.

He studied medicine at Cambridge and Oxford Universities in the UK and did post-graduate training in Newcastle, Oxford and London. He is a registered clinical specialist in Infectious Diseases in the UK. He also trained in Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. 

Since 1993 he has been based at the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme in Kilifi, Kenya undertaking research on infectious disease epidemiology. His initial studies were on the aetiology and risk factors for pneumonia in adults and he quickly focused on pneumococcal disease. His pneumococcal interests have included improved diagnostics, sero-epidemiology, colonisation and transmission, pathogen transcription studies in the nasopharynx, host susceptibility and risk factors for invasive disease, including sickle cell anaemia, and the interaction between malaria and invasive pneumococcal disease. He has conducted vaccine trials on pneumococcal conjugate vaccines (PCV), including newborn schedules and fractional doses, and on a novel whole cell pneumococcal vaccine. He has also studied wider infectious diseases including the epidemiology of tuberculosis in children, transmission of non-Typhi Salmonella, and the role of malaria in the aetiology of hypertension in East Africa. He has had a particular interest in the aetiology of childhood illness and death and has led local groups contributing to two multi-centre studies – of Pneumonia (PERCH) in Kenya and of childhood mortality (CHAMPS) in Ethiopia. In Ethiopia, he is co-founder of the Haraghe Health Research Collaboration.

In 2000 in Kilifi, Anthony established a Health and Demographic Surveillance System which has been the framework for several collaborative studies with the Ministry of Health in Kenya of the real-world impact of childhood vaccines, including conjugate vaccines against H. influenzae type b and pneumococcus. He established safety surveillance for PCV and studied the determinants and estimation methods of vaccine coverage. He initiated a surveillance system for invasive bacterial infections across Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Ethiopia which was co-opted into the WHO Invasive Bacterial Vaccine-Preventable Disease surveillance. During the COVID-19 pandemic he led studies on the sero-epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2 in Kenya and the mortality impact of the pandemic.

Since 2013, Anthony has also worked on vaccine research and policy in the UK. He is Director of the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Immunisation, which is an academic collaboration with the UK Health Security Agency focused on policy-relevant vaccine research, and he was founding director of the Vaccine Centre at LSHTM. Between 2013 and 2023 he was a member of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI). At LSHTM he runs an annual short course on Vaccine Evaluation which trains 40 local and international students on vaccine epidemiology, safety and policy. He has been a temporary consultant to WHO on many occasions, has provided expert advice on vaccine research and policy to the UKHSA (formerly PHE) and GAVI and has served on monitoring committees for several vaccine trials.