There are few things that frustrate Mainga Hamaluba more than having no way to help her patients. At the hospital where she works in Kilifi, Kenya, many of those patients are newborns with sepsis, an injury to the brain or prematurity. The limited treatment options available have not changed for decades, nor have they been scientifically proven to work in resource limited settings such as these.

Mainga is working to build a new framework that will give clinicians more tools and greater clarity on effective newborn health strategies. Her work will evaluate multiple interventions for babies suffering from various conditions at the same time. This research approach - called a pragmatic adaptive trial platform - tends to be faster and more efficient than traditional randomized trials that have fixed parameters and study one problem at a time.

"Being in a setting where you realize there are very limited things you can do and there isn't clear evidence about what works makes you want to find the empirical evidence that says this is how we improve this child's outcome," said Mainga.

Mainga started her research career with the Oxford Vaccine Group in the U.K. Her work as a junior researcher facilitated the introduction of the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine in Nepal - an experience that fueled her ambition to work in public health in low-and-middle-income countries.

She is currently the head of clinical research at the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme where she oversees half a dozen clinical trials and mentors young African researchers.

Mainga's investigation into new solutions for neonatal care is just the beginning of a longer project. She hopes the adaptive research framework will transform the way research is conducted in Africa and lead to a surge of innovations in places operating with limited resources.

"I'd love to use this research framework to show proof of principle that it can work in our setting," said Mainga. "This approach could be - and should be - a framework that clinicians and researchers use to tackle major public health issues."