It is with great sadness that we share the news that Margie passed away in January 2026. Her vibrant and wide-reaching legacy continues, not least in the work to which she dedicated much of her life: on how to prevent unintentional injuries, particularly in resource-strapped countries.

While road injuries were the biggest issue, Margie's work also canvased other significant problems of drowning, burns and falls, and identified interventions that could save lives. Her research looked at what works, specifically in developing countries. It provided evidence on how to prevent injuries before they happen. But it also looked at the post-crash phase, working with nurses – who are the mainstay of healthcare provision in developing countries – to provide optimum treatment management. In some developing countries, traumatic injuries account for up to 70%-80% of the caseloads in emergency rooms. If you can stop these injuries upstream, there are enormous gains for healthcare systems, both financially and in terms of workforce needs.

Representing The George Institute for Global Health and South Africa, Margie was a member of the Commonwealth Road Safety Initiative Expert Panel and together with colleagues from Kenya and Canada led the data analysis for the reports being developed ahead of the 3rd Ministerial level meeting in Sweden in February 2020 and the CHOG meeting in Rwanda. She was also a member of the Academic Expert Group for this Ministerial meeting, a group responsible for making an independent and scientific assessment of the progress made during the Decade of Action for Road Safety. The Academic Expert Group will also recommend a road safety strategy for the period 2020-2030. Margie was also Chair of the Global Advisory Board for the Malawi Road Safety Research and Implementation Unit at the University of Malawi.

Dennis Mazingi is a medical doctor and general surgeon with a special interest in paediatric injury prevention, global surgery, and surgically correctable NCDs. He has worked in clinical medicine and surgery in southern Africa for almost a decade and is currently pursuing a DPhil in the University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences in the global surgery group.

His work focuses on trauma surveillance and quality improvement in paediatric trauma care in Zimbabwe. He is ably supervised by Professor Kokila Lakhoo and Professor Ashok Handa at the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences and Professor Godfrey Muguti at the University of Zimbabwe.

Prior to joining The George Institute Dennis obtained his undergraduate medical degree at the University of Malawi, College of Medicine and an MMed (Master’s in Medicine) in General Surgery at the University of Zimbabwe, College of Health Sciences. He holds a first-class degree in International Health and Tropical Medicine (IHTM) from the University of Oxford and is a fellow of the College of Surgeons of South Africa as well as a Beit Trust Scholar.

He has worked in various research collaboratives in the field of global surgery, paediatric surgery, and general surgery. Dennis’s other interests lie in clinical surgery, surgical education, disruptive health technologies, frugal innovations, health systems and implementation research.

Dennis wants to see a healthier, more prosperous, more equitable world through surgical care and research. His mission is to help accelerate progress towards SDG target 3.6: to halve the number of deaths and injuries from road traffic accidents by 2030 in Zimbabwe and globally; and to scale up quality surgical and anaesthesia care to the 5 billion people who need it through 2030 and beyond.

Prasanthi is an injury epidemiologist focusing on monitoring and evaluation of child road safety projects in 6 countries through the Botnar Foundation and working with longitudinal data to analyse gender differences and injuries amongst a large cohort of adolescents from Vietnam, Peru, Ethiopia and India.

Prasanthi obtained her medical degree from Cambridge University (UK), and then spent over a decade working within the field of injury prevention at Johns Hopkins (Baltimore, US). With a young family and move back to the UK, she wanted to be part of a dynamic and innovative team slightly closer to home and was therefore thrilled to have the opportunity to join the George Institute, UK, helping to further develop the injury research portfolio.

Professor Simone Pettigrew is the Head of Food Policy. She has qualifications in Economics, Marketing, and Consumer Psychology. Her broad areas of expertise include behavioural psychology, health promotion, health policy, communications, social marketing, and intervention research.

Along with nutrition, her substantive areas of research include obesity, physical activity, alcohol consumption, smoking, active transport, and healthy ageing. Simone sits on numerous advisory committees and regularly performs research consultancies for NGO and government entities. To date, she has published more than 400 peer-reviewed papers and produced more than 160 technical reports for NGOs and government departments.

See Professor Pettigrew's full CV here.