An interview with Joy Lawn: Hidden deaths of the world’s newborn babies

Joy Lawn is an African-born paediatrician and perinatal epidemiologist with British citizenship. She is based in South Africa as Senior Research and Policy Advisor with the Saving Newborn Lives programme of Save the Children-USA. She completed her medical degree in 1990 in the United Kingdom and has worked in several African countries providing newborn care services and training. She shifted to public health working at the WHO Collaborating Centre in Reproductive Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, United States of America (1998–2001), and then at the Institute of Child Health, in the United Kingdom (2001–2004). She co-led the Neonatal Group in the Child Health Epidemiology Reference Group (CHERG), which developed the first estimate of annual global neonatal deaths, published in the Lancet neonatal series and the World health report 2005. W HO