C Louise Thwaites

Professor Louise Thwaites is a clinical researcher and expert in critical care and emerging infections, with appointments at the Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health, University of Oxford, and the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit (OUCRU) in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. She holds a Research Fellowship at Linacre College.

Her work focuses on improving outcomes for critically ill patients in resource-limited settings. She has longstanding research interests in severe infectious diseases, including tetanus, sepsis, dengue and pneumonia, and has led major clinical trials, including studies of magnesium sulphate and intrathecal antitoxin in tetanus.

Her research programme aims to advance the diagnosis and management of severe infections through innovative technologies adapted for low-resource environments. This includes the application of wearable physiological monitoring and artificial intelligence–based risk prediction in the VITAL project. She currently leads PHENOM-AI, a multidisciplinary UK–Vietnam collaboration integrating artificial intelligence, advanced pathogen identification and immune profiling to better characterise pneumonia and inform future diagnostic and treatment strategies.

Professor Thwaites is a board member of the BMJ Future Health initiative, and plays an active role in  international guideline and policy development. She is a member of the Asia Pacific Sepsis Association and contributes to the Sepsis in Resource-Limited Settings Consensus Group of the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine. She serves as an expert consultant to the World Health Organization (WHO), is a member of the WHO advisory group for COVID-19 Clinical Management Living Guidelines, the WHO Global Clinical Platform Technical Advisory Group, and the WHO O2ptimising Respiratory Care Working Group. She is also a board member of the BMJ Future Health initiative.