Marta Tufet Bayona is a British and Spanish biologist and public health resource coordinator with a specialty in malaria. She is executive director of the UK Collaborative on Development Research.
Early life and education
Tufet is from the United Kingdom. She is half Ecuadorian.[1]
Tufet received a BSc in biology from Imperial College London.[1] She remained there for her doctoral degree, where she specialised in parasitology and studied rhoptry proteins. In 2006, Tufet earned a PhD in cellular and molecular biology from the Faculty of Life Sciences at Imperial College London. Her thesis was titled "Search for Novel Rhoptry Proteins in Plasmodium Berghei".[2]
From 2009 to 2017, Tufet worked in various positions at Wellcome Trust in London.[4] In her position as science portfolio adviser, she coordinated grant funding in the areas of animal health, bacteriology and immunology. This involved coordination of projects for the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme (a partnership with the Kenya Medical Research Institute), the UK Biobank, the Insect Pollinators Initiative and the Bloomsbury Centre for Tropical Medicine. As international activities adviser, she worked to support educational research as part of the African Institutions Initiative.[5] She worked on the Global Health Trials Initiative, DELTAS Africa programme, and on the Ebola Research Funding Initiative.[6][7]
In 2014, Tufet worked as an adviser in discovery and translational sciences for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, where she looked to develop collaborative projects with the Wellcome Trust. As part of this work, from 2014 to 2015, she established the Alliance for Accelerating Excellence in Science in Africa (AESA) partnership, part of the African Academy of Sciences that was endorsed by the African Union, which looks to develop research infrastructure, support entrepreneurs, train young scientists and identify gaps in African science.[8][9] She spent one year working at the African Academy of Sciences to implement the AESA partnership, which was in coordination with the African Union's economic development program New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD). The work was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and Department for International Development (DFID). As part of her work at the Wellcome Trust, Tufet was involved with the Ebola research response.[10] As part of this work, she oversaw the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) programme in Nairobi, Kenya.
In 2018, Tufet became executive director of the UK Collaborative on Development Research (UKCDR), an interdisciplinary group of governmental departments and international development funding providers[13][14]
Tufet is involved with the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic.[15] As part of this effort, she partnered with The Global Health Network and the African Academy of Sciences to survey researchers and better understand what the community needs. She identified that researchers needed guidance in how to mitigate myths as well as advice on how and when to implement social distancing.[15][16]
Norton, Alice; De La Horra Gozalo, Arancha; Feune de Colombi, Nicole; Alobo, Moses; Mutheu Asego, Juliete; Al-Rawni, Zainab; Antonio, Emila; Parker, James; Mwangi, Wayne; Adhiambo, Colette; Marsh, Kevin; Tufet Bayona, Marta; Piot, Peter; Lang, Trudie A. (15 July 2020). "The remaining unknowns: A mixed methods study of the current and global health research priorities for COVID-19". medRxiv10.1101/2020.06.24.20138198v2.
