Dr Saima Afaq
Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) Global Public Health
Profile
Biography
Saima currently serves as a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Global Public Health at the Department of Health Sciences, University of York, UK. She is the Lead Investigator for COPE-BP (Community Pharmacies Managing Hypertension: Intervention Development and Evaluation in Bangladesh and Pakistan), a major five-year NIHR-funded programme aimed at strengthening health systems by engaging informal health-providing entities—such as community pharmacies—within the formal healthcare system to improve hypertension care in South Asia.
She also leads the Valuing Voices project (Global Equity in Research: A Gender-Inclusive Approach), which promotes inclusive research leadership and supports female researchers in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
At York, Saima co-leads the Population Health and Diabetes Intervention Adaptation groups within the Centre for IMPACT. She leads the POTENTIAL project (Proving Optimised TB and Diabetes Integrated Care) across Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), alongside other major studies including DiaDeM (Diabetes and Depression Multimorbidity) and TB multimorbidity. Her earlier contributions include work on global studies such as LOLIPOP study, iHealth-T2D study, and IMPACT-CCD.
Saima’s research focuses on improving physical and mental health, addressing multimorbidity, and strengthening integrated and collaborative care pathways—particularly for migrant South Asian populations and communities in LMICs—with the overarching aim of advancing universal health coverage.
Qualifications
- Fellowship of Faculty of Public Health (FFPH) UK (Jun’2022)
- PhD in Public Health (Clinical medicine/Epidemiology and Biostatistics) from Imperial College London (Mar’ 2018).
- MBBS (NUST, Pakistan Dec’2010)
Departmental roles
- Member of the Culture Club Dept. of Health Sciences
- Member of the Global Public Health Group
- Faculty at the Public Health Society
- Leadership learning set, Centre for IMPACT