Dr Sema Mandal
Deputy Director, UKHSA
sema.mandal@ukhsa.gov.ukhttp://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sema_MandalDeputy Director and Consultant Medical Epidemiologist, Blood Safety, Hepatitis, STI & HIV Division, UKHSA
Dr Mandal is a medical consultant epidemiologist lead for hepatitis and works on hepatitis elimination, incident response, surveillance, guidance, policy advice and research projects. She is a co-investigator and co-applicant on a number of viral hepatitis research projects and is the consultant clinical lead for the infant hepatitis B selective and universal immunisation programmes. She is an honorary associate professor at UCL.
Dr Mandal is also a member of national and international expert committees on hepatitis, including the WHO SAGE working group on hepatitis A immunisation. During COVID pandemic in 2020-21 Sema established and led national hospital surveillance for COVID-19, data from which contributed to vaccine effectiveness studies and JCVI advice on vaccine roll out and prioritisation.
As part of the response to the West African Ebola epidemic in 2013-2014 she was a co-investigator on the WHO-led Ebola vaccine phase III clinical trial in Guinea which demonstrated the first vaccine effectiveness of a novel Ebola vaccine.
Prior to returning to PHE (now UKHSA) in 2013, Sema worked at the US Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta in the Meningitis and Vaccine Preventable Diseases Branch, working on surveillance, outbreak investigations and vaccine evaluations.
