Professor Rashan Haniffa

Rashan completed his postgraduate training as a critical care physician and anaesthetist in London prior to being appointed as a consultant in intensive care medicine at UCLH. Rashan was awarded a PhD scholarship by the University of Oxford, where his doctoral work was on developing methods for continuous healthcare evaluation in resource-limited settings. During this time he co-founded (and currently directs) NICS-MORU, a not-for-profit research unit based in Sri Lanka, that develops and curates digital registries to strengthen research capacity and facilitate data driven service improvement in Asia and Africa.

He is professor and chair of critical care medicine and health systems research at the University of Edinburgh, whereby he is co-lead of the Wellcome UKRI/MRC funded Collaboration for Research, Implementation and Training in Asia and Africa.

This research consortium seeks to develop and implement near real-time digital healthcare registries, undertake population health surveillance and interventional research in multiple Asian and African countries. The overarching goal of the research is to empower a community of practice to solve healthcare problems, partly by supervision and mentorship of PhD candidates internationally. He has been appointed to leadership positions by the WHO and ISARIC. Rashan has an MSc in Clinical Trials at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and also works as a consultant in intensive care at the General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University Hospital, Sri Lanka.