DrFelicity Fitzgerald

I am a Wellcome Trust Clinical Senior Lecturer in Paediatric Infectious Diseases, and an honorary consultant in Paediatric Infectious Diseases at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.

I work between the UK and Harare, Zimbabwe on a portfolio of studies aimed at improving diagnosis, management and prevention of neonatal sepsis in low-resource settings. I'm on particularly interested in how we can improve infection prevention and control (IPC) and limit the spread of anti-microbial resistance, despite the challenges of working with few and intermittent resources.

Within my Fellowship, I aim to develop an AI-enabled clinical decision support tool to safely reduce antibiotic use in newborns in low-resource settings. Alongside the tool development, we are working with clinicians to explore how their context impacts on antibiotic decision-making, and with families to understand how we can better involve them in antibiotic decision-making for their babies. I work with a multidisciplinary international team based between University College London, Zimbabwe and Malawi which has co-developed Neotree, a digital quality improvement tool aiming to support clinicians in low-resource settings care for vulnerable neonates while capturing data. Since 2018 we have captured data on >37,000 neonates and trained >500 clinicians in Malawi and Zimbabwe. We have set up a charity to support wider implementation of Neotree beyond the research setting, and have received funding from the Wellcome Trust, UNICEF, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Institute for Health and Care Research.

My research is based at The Health Research Unit, Zimbabwe (THRU-Zim), within the Biomedical Research and Training Institute (BRTI), in Harare, Zimbabwe, where I am PhD Lead. At Imperial, I am a Section Representative within the Paediatric Infectious Diseases Section.

My previous work has included a PhD at University College London investigating microbial translocation in children with HIV in Uganda. During my PhD I volunteered to work clinically in the 2014-2015 West African Ebola Virus Disease outbreak, and stayed on to set up the largest paediatric cohort study to date investigating nosocomial transmission of Ebola Virus Disease and outcomes for those children infected with EVD.

I trained in medicine at Trinity College, Cambridge; and UCL Medical School prior to following the Academic Clinical Training Pathway in Paediatric Infectious Diseases, obtaining my Certificate of Completion of Training in 2022.

I'm currently supervising Wellcome and MRC-funded PhD students working between Zimbabwe, Uganda and the UK, and would be delighted to hear from potential students at undergraduate and postgraduate level, especially those from low-resource settings.