Shams El Arifeen is a senior scientist and director of the Centre for Child and Adolescent Health at ICDDR,B. Dr. Arifeen currently heads the Child Health Unit at ICDDR,B where he works extensively on child and neonatal health, health services and health systems research. Dr. Arifeen is also an adjunct professor at the James P. Grant School of Public Health at the BRAC University in Bangladesh, where he teaches epidemiology and supervises MPH students in their independent research.

Dr. Arifeen has nearly 25 years of experience in child health, including nine years in government health services, with a focus on health interventions for developing populations. He also has extensive experience in research design and implementation, with particular expertise in cluster randomized trials and large-scale surveys as well as with community and facility-based evaluations of interventions and programs, using both experimental and quasi-experimental designs.

He actively participates in national efforts within Bangladesh to scale up the evidence base on neonatal and child health interventions. Dr. Arifeen currently leads the team assisting the government of Bangladesh and its partners in monitoring and evaluating health services and programs.

He provides technical assistance to the government of Bangladesh, nongovernmental organizations and other organizations. He has served on a number of Bangladesh’s technical and advisory committees, including the National Committee on Immunization Practices, Technical Sub-Committee on National Newborn Health Strategy and the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey, Urban Health Survey and Bangladesh Maternal Mortality Survey technical committees.

Dr. Arifeen contributed to the 2003 Lancet Series on Child Survival and has published more than 135 scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals.

Dr. Arifeen holds an MBBS and PhD and has trained in medicine, public health, nutrition and epidemiology.