Professor Stanley Luchters

Biography

Stanley Luchters is a Professor in Population Health and Environment at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and a Visiting Professor at the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at Ghent University.

As a clinical epidemiologist, his career spans more than 25 years working in medical and population health research, as well as program implementation, in more than 10 low- and middle-income countries in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, including China, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, Laos PDR, Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Zimbabwe. He has lived and worked in sub-Saharan Africa for more than 13 of the past 25 years.

Since 2022, Stanley has been the Executive Director at Centre for Sexual Health and HIV AIDS Research in Zimbabwe leading a team of more than 400 staff involved in the conduct and implementation of sexual and reproductive health research and services.

To date, he has published over 200 publications (h-index 57) in international peer-reviewed journals.

Research interests

Stanley has particular expertise in the design, conduct, management and analysis of clinical, behavioural, and health systems interventions that have a population health impact, with an extensive background assessing the intervention effectiveness on sexual and reproductive health among vulnerable groups, including sex workers, men who have sex with men, pregnant women and children. He has led more than 25 research studies as Principal Investigator and over 20 as co-investigator, including pragmatic trials, (cluster) randomised controlled trials, quasi-experimental studies, cohort studies, diagnostic performance studies, qualitative inquiries, and numerous implementation science and capacity building projects. Since 2019, Stanley has made the work around the impacts of climate change on sexual reproductive health a priority, and has been particularly assessing the health effects and community perceptions of extreme heat on maternal and child heath in Africa.

Teaching

Stanley has supervised more than 15 PhD candidates to completion as Primary Supervisor. The majority of these students came from low- and middle-income countries including Kenya, Mozambique, Myanmar, China, Vietnam and India. As the foundation Chair of the Department of Population Health at the Aga Khan University, he developed the curriculum for a two-year full-time Masters in Population Health Science, and contributed to the Master of Medicine training on research methods and dissertation supervision. 

Selected research publications

Reducing Extreme Heat Impacts on Health in Pregnant Women and Infants: a community based intervention in Kilifi, Kenya – Journal: Health Policy and Planning – Published: 1st October 2025

Kenyan dietitians’ knowledge of ketogenic dietary therapies for drug-resistant epilepsy – Journal: BMC Nutrition – Published: 2nd August 2025

Quantifying intra-urban socio-economic and environmental vulnerability to extreme heat events in Johannesburg, South Africa – Journal: International Journal of Biometeorology – Published: 2nd July 2025

Economic returns on investing in early childhood development in Vietnam: a cost-benefit analysis – Journal: BMC Health Services Research – Published: 15th March 2025

Visibilising lived experiences and heat coping practices of women in rural Zimbabwe through photovoice – Journal: Social Science and Medicine – Published: 15th January 2025

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