Alafia Samuels

Professor T. Alafia Samuels, former Director of the George Alleyne Chronic Disease Research Centre, University of the West Indies, Barbados, is now with the Caribbean Institute for Health Research, UWI in Jamaica. She is a medical doctor, trained at UWI in Jamaica with an MPH and a PhD in Chronic Disease Epidemiology from Johns Hopkins University.

Her career has included both working with the Ministry of Health Jamaica delivering and managing public sector health programmes 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, immediate past Chair-of NCD Child, and member of the WHO newly constituted High-level Policy Expert Group on NCDs in SIDS.

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. She led the formal evaluation of the CARICOM Heads of Government 2007 Port of Spain Declaration on NCDs, and from 2008 – 2022, reported annually on NCDs to the caucus of Ministers of Health of 20 CARICOM countries.