At the 8th Malaria Conference, held in Kigali Rwanda from April 21st - 27th, 2024, the MIM Secretariat of the Founders and the General Assembly requested Prof Abdisalan Noor to serve as Interim President of the MIM Society. He will work alongside the MIM Society’s Secretariat Co-Chairs-Prof Rose Leke & Prof Jean Pierre Vangeertruyden, the Executive Director/CEO-Prof Wilfred Mbacham, Program Coordinator-Amina Knipiler and Strategic Advisory Board representative-Prof Evelyn Ansah, Andre Tchouatieu as Partner Institutional representative, Pr. Jean Louis Ndiaye and Jean Louis Mangara, as 7th and 8th PAMC host representatives. He will lead the transition of the Society activities towards its rebranding, strengthening and expanding the functions of the secretariat and moving the MIM Society towards an active membership and election of its first executive board.

Prof Abdisalan Noor comes to the MIM Society’s leadership with a wealth of experience in research, country engagement and global health. He has served as the Director of the Nairobi Programme of the Kenya Medical Research Institute – Wellcome Trust Research Programme. He led the Strategic Information Unit of the WHO’s Global Malaria Programme where he was the lead of author of the World Malaria Reports since 2017 and has championed control efforts and population health through the application of local data for local decisions in the tailoring of malaria intervention subnationally. Prof Noor is currently a Visiting Professor at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health where he focuses on sustainable public health analytics in low income countries.

The Multilateral Initiative on Malaria that Prof Noor will serve as Interim President was founded in 1997 during a meeting in Dakar, under the NIH’s leadership of Dr. Harold Varmus as an alliance of individuals, funding partners and four autonomous constituents, MIM-WHO/TDR that provided funding to young researchers, MIMCom that provided communication and internet hubs to research groups in Africa at the time when it was difficult to get connectivity, MR4 that provided scarce biological reagents to researchers and a rotatory MIM Secretariat that coordinated the logistics of MIM Pan African Malaria Conferences.

Beginning in 2022, the MIM has transformed into a membership society committed to the cause of ending malaria. The MIM Society’s mission is to strengthen and sustain, through collaborative research and training, the capacity of malaria-endemic countries in Africa to carry out research required to develop and improve tools for malaria control and to strengthen the research-control interphase.

ED/CEO-WFM