25 Facts About Joy Lawn

Joy Elizabeth Lawn is a British paediatrician and professor of maternal, reproductive and child health.

Joy Lawn developed the epidemiological evidence for the worldwide policy and programming that looks to reduce neonatal deaths and stillbirths and works on large-scale implementation research.

Joy Lawn studied medicine at the University of Nottingham and specialised in paediatrics, graduating in 1990.

Joy Lawn moved back to Africa in the early 1990s, working as a neonatologist and lecturer at Kumasi in Ghana.

Joy Lawn helped set up neonatal care at the University of Ghana Teaching Hospital.

Joy Lawn was upset by many neonatal deaths daily and worked to reduce mortality with simple approaches, such as detecting infections early and not rotating nurses off neonatal wards.

Joy Lawn became more interested in public health, and joined the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Joy Lawn found there were very few statistics on infant mortality as many babies who die in the Developing World are not registered at birth.

Joy Lawn moved to the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health in 2001, where she completed a PhD in 2009.

Joy Lawn worked for Save the Children USA from 2005.

Joy Lawn was based in South Africa from 2005 to 2012 with Save the Children USA to work with 9 African countries to save newborn lives and undertaking large scale community trials.

Joy Lawn was awarded a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award to improve data on stillbirths and newborns.

Joy Lawn started to coordinate neonatal death and stillbirth estimates for the United Nations with the United Nations Child Health Epidemiology Reference Group from 2004.

Joy Lawn developed the first cause of death estimates for neonatal deaths, which was published in The Lancet in 2005.

Joy Lawn found in Uttar Pradesh neonatal mortality rates were as high as 60 in 1000 livebirths and 41 per 1000 in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Joy Lawn developed the continuum of care for reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health.

Joy Lawn co-led The Lancet Stillbirth series in 2011 and 2016.

Joy Lawn presented a Lancet TV series on Ending the Stillbirth epidemic.

Joy Lawn was appointed to the Department for International Development Senior Research Fellow for newborn health in 2011 to 2015.

Joy Lawn has worked to draw attention to equity issues and was involved with the Countdown to 2015 initiative.

Joy Lawn believes that kangaroo care could prevent death and disability caused by preterm birth and is an important foundation for intensive care that is family centred.

Joy Lawn estimated that over one million children under 5 years old died from complications of pregnancy.

Joy Lawn was awarded the 2013 Programme for Global Paediatric Research award for Outstanding Contributions to Global Child Health.

Joy Lawn was made a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2016.

Joy Lawn was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2018.