Alafia Samuels

Prof T. Alafia Samuels, former Director of the George Alleyne Chronic Disease Research Centre, University of the West Indies (UWI), Barbados is now with Caribbean Institute for Health Research, UWI in Jamaica. She is a medical doctor, trained at UWI Mona. She also holds a MPH (Masters in Public Health) and a PhD in Chronic Disease Epidemiology, from Johns Hopkins University. She has led evaluations of Caribbean NCD programmes, including annual country evaluations of the 2007 CARICOM Port of Spain NCD declaration and the more formal evaluation of the POS Declaration on NCDs. She was the Principal Investigator of the large, recently concluded IDRC funded Food and Nutrition project in the region. Her career has included both working with the Ministry of Health Jamaica for 20 years and academia at the University of the West Indies for the last 10 years. She is a Technical Advisor to the Healthy Caribbean Coalition, a member of the High-level Policy Expert Group for the WHO Small Islands Developing States (SIDS) High-level Technical Meeting and subsequent WHO SIDS Ministerial Conference on NCDs and Mental Health, a member of the WHO Strategic and Technical Advisory Group on the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases (STAG-NCD), Chair of NCD Child, Board Member of World Obesity Federation, Lancet One Health Commissioner. Her research interests include policy, practice and evaluation of NCD prevention and control programmes and translating evidence into practice. She has more than 50 publications in peer reviewed journals and has authored Strategic NCD plans for CARICOM (2011-2015), Ministry of Health Barbados (2015-2019) and Ministry of Health and Wellness Jamaica (2022-2030). A 2016 Lancet profile dubbed her “the fast food watchdog of the Caribbean”