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Clinical Research

Researcher

Prof. Charles Newton

Principal Investigator

KEMRI | Wellcome Trust

About

Charles was born in Kenya, qualified in Cape Town, South Africa, with postgraduate training in Paediatrics in Manchester and London, United Kingdom. As a lecturer at University of Oxford, he returned to Kilifi Kenya in 1989, to help set up an unit to study severe malaria in African children. Thereafter he spent 2 years as a Post-doctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins, USA; studying mechanisms of brain damage in central nervous system infections. He completed his training in Paediatric Neurology at Great Ormond Street Hospital, UK. In 1998 he was awarded a Wellcome Trust Senior Clinical Fellowship at University College London, to return to Kilifi, to study CNS infections in children. He has published on a wide variety of subjects concerning sick children in tropical countries. In 2011 he took up a professorship in Psychiatry at the University of Oxford to concentrate of neurological and mental illness disorders in children living in Africa.

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Current Work

He conducts research on CNS infections in children; epidemiological studies of epilepsy and neurological impairment; tetanus, jaundice and sepsis in neonates. At present he is conducting studies of Autism and Epilepsy in Africa and working on sickle cell disease in Tanzania.

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Recent Publications

View all 405 publications
  1. 2026
    Performance of the University of California, San Diego Brief Assessment of Capacity to Consent (UBACC) questionnaire in mental health genetic research in Africa

    Akena, D. Otike, C. Kalungi, et al.

    BMJ Open. 2026; 16:e122701

  2. 2026
    Ethical Considerations in Community-Based Intervention Research in Low-Income, High-Stigma Settings: Reflections from the SPARK Project in Ethiopia and Kenya

    Haile Kifle, T. Demissie, M. Angwenyi, et al.

    Autism. 2026; 13623613261495493

  3. 2026
    Professional Quality of Life Among Non-Specialist Healthcare Workers Trained in Child and Adolescent Mental Health in Kenya: A Mixed-Methods Study

    Mkubwa, B. Angwenyi, V. Odhiambo, et al.

    J Multidiscip Healthc. 2026; 19:623146

  4. 2026
    Reducing the diagnostic and treatment gap for priority mental, neurological and substance misuse disorders in primary care in rural Kenya: Results of a stepped wedge cluster randomized trial from the EPINA study

    Bitta, M. A. Kariuki, S. M. Mwanga, et al.

    PLoS One. 2026; 21:e0352643

  5. 2026
    Utility of Face2Gene's DeepGestalt and D-Score applications in paediatric neurodevelopmental disorders in South Africa

    Bruwer, Z. Mc Donald, H. Zieff, et al.

    Eur J Hum Genet. 2026