Evans Atiah Asamane

Biography

Dr Evans Atiah Asamane is an MRC Career Development Award Fellow at Keele University and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, with more than a decade of experience in public health and nutrition practice and research across the UK and West Africa. His research focuses on designing, implementing, and evaluating feasible, scalable, and cost-effective interventions to improve the health and well-being of populations at risk of poor nutrition and infectious diseases. He has expertise in stakeholder engagement, applied qualitative methods, and the delivery of cluster randomised controlled trials across Africa.

Evans previously worked as a District Nutrition Officer with the Ghana Health Service, leading maternal and child health nutrition programmes and collaborating with international partners on community-based interventions. He completed an MSc in Human Nutrition at the University of Sheffield as a Commonwealth Scholar and later joined the University of Birmingham as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Early Stage Research Fellow, where he earned his PhD. His doctoral research focused on nutrition and physical function among older ethnic minority populations, using mixed methods.

Following his PhD, he worked at Keele University as an applied qualitative health researcher on two large randomised controlled trials (iPOPP and PROP OA), before moving to the University of Birmingham as Research Fellow and Project Manager on the MaaCiwara trial, a large cluster RCT testing a low cost, scalable, and adaptable community intervention to reduce diarrhoea and improve child growth in urban poor and rural Mali. He then returned to Keele as a Teaching Fellow in Public and Global Health, before taking up his current MRC fellowship.

Research and scholarship

Dr Evans Asamane is a public health researcher with expertise in nutrition and infectious disease prevention, particularly in the context of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) and child health in sub-Saharan Africa. His research focuses on co-developing and evaluating practical, culturally grounded interventions that can be delivered at scale to improve child growth and reduce the burden of diseases in low-resource settings.

He has methodological expertise in mixed-methods research, community co-development (working with stakeholders), and the design, implementation, and evaluation of interventions and trials. He also has extensive experience in qualitative health research, including process evaluations of large-scale randomised controlled trials.

Teaching

Presently he contributes to postgraduate teaching and student support. Earlier, at the University of Birmingham, he co-led an MPH module and supported teaching on the MPH programme.

Evans currently supervises one PhD student and has previously supervised more than fifteen MPH and several undergraduate students. Evans has also engaged in pedagogical research, specifically, exploring the relevance of flipped learning in higher education.

Supervision

I am actively supervising PhD and postgraduate students in public and global health, and welcome expressions of interest from prospective PhD candidates who are passionate about advancing research in these areas.

Collaborations and grants awards

Dr Asamane’s research has been supported by diverse funding sources, including the EU Horizon 2020, UK Medical Research Council (MRC), the Wellcome Trust ISSF, the GCRF Consolidation Account, the ISPF Institutional Support Grant, and the Institute for Global Innovation (IGI) at the University of Birmingham.

He has secured and delivered over four successful grants as Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator, focusing on nutrition, hygiene, and public health interventions in Africa and the UK.

These projects have fostered strong collaborations with international partners across sub-Saharan Africa, particularly Ghana and Mali, and have strengthened interdisciplinary research networks linking public health, nutrition, and implementation science

Current award/fellowship

MRC Career Development Award Fellowship (2025–2030, £1.4m): Developing and evaluating a culturally sensitive community-wide intervention to reduce pathogen transmission through communal hand rinsing in Ghana.