Elizabeth Ashley

Elizabeth Ashley, Director of the Lao-Oxford-Mahosot Hospital-Wellcome Trust Research Unit (LOMWRU) in Lao PDR since 2019, is a UK-trained physician who specialises in Infectious Diseases and Medical Microbiology & Virology.

Liz first joined the MORU network in 2000, working in Bangkok before moving to Mae Sot later that year to work with SMRU, where she stayed until 2006 and completed her PhD on chemotherapeutic studies of multidrug resistant malaria with the Open University.

After time spent doing research and clinical work in Paris and London, she returned to MORU in 2011 to lead the Tracking Resistance to Artemisinin Collaboration (TRAC) until early 2013. TRAC mapped the global extent of artemisinin resistance in Plasmodium falciparum in a definitive trial at 15 sites in 10 countries in Asia and Africa, validated newly discovered molecular markers for artemisinin resistance and described new putative markers associated with slow parasite clearance.

Liz re-joined the network in October 2016 as Director of Clinical Research at the Myanmar Oxford Clinical Research Unit (MOCRU) before moving to LOMWRU in May 2019 to take up the Director’s post.

Liz is an Associate Editor for the Malaria Journal, an active member of the PLOS Medicine Editorial Board and on the International Scientific Advisory Board for The Lancet Infectious Diseases. She is on the Council of the International Society for Infectious Diseases. She chaired the first working group of the Surveillance and Epidemiology of Drug Resistant Infections Consortium (SEDRIC), a global think tank on AMR.

Since moving to LOMWRU Liz has taken over the supervision of research on a wide range of infectious diseases common in Laos. Her interests include malaria, tropical diseases, therapeutics, clinical trials, bacteriology in low-and middle-income countries, and antimicrobial resistance.