Sarah Macfarlane, a university Professor and founding member of a global health organisation, has been given an alumni award at the December graduation ceremonies.
Professor Sarah Macfarlane graduated from Lancaster with a degree in Economics in 1968.
Having worked for many years in the North West, Sarah is now a Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and is a founding member of UCSF Global Health Sciences, an organisation dedicated to improving health and reducing disease in the world’s most vulnerable populations.
Her career has been concerned with the application of quantitative methods to solve global health problems and building health workforce capacity in Africa.
Sarah spent the first part of her career in the Department of Applied Statistics at the University of Reading, where she taught and undertook operational research in the National Health Service. She then joined the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, where she became a Reader in epidemiology and statistics. There she conducted demographic and epidemiological research specialising in the nutritional assessment of children. Before joining UCSF, she was an Associate Director at the Rockefeller Foundation supporting public health programmes in East Africa and South East Asia.