Gillian McKay

Gillian is the Senior Humanitarian Health Research Adviser for the R2HC programme. She joined Elrha in 2022 and works to ensure that the research that we fund meets the priority needs of the humanitarian community and is shared with the right people to make change. She engages with public health researchers globally to ensure that Elrha-funded research is rigorous, ethical, and responsive to the needs of people affected by crisis. Gillian has a clinical background as a nurse, and worked in humanitarian public health for NGOs, the UN and with research institutions prior to joining Elrha. She holds a Doctorate of Public Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where she researched how communities engaged with responses to Ebola outbreaks in Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Gillian’s passion for bringing people with shared interests together enables her to connect communities, humanitarian practitioners, researchers and policy makers at all levels to generate and use evidence to solve complex humanitarian problems.