Dr. Shams El Arifeen is the Senior Director of the Maternal and Child Health Division at icddr,b. He is also a Professor at the James P. Grant School of Public Health at the BRAC University in Bangladesh, where he teaches Epidemiology. He has worked for over 30 years in the fields of maternal, newborn and child health, nutrition and development, particularly focusing on community and facility-based evaluations of interventions and programs addressing common causes of illness and death. He also has experience in implementation research to improve delivery of services as well as developing monitoring systems. He actively participates in national efforts to scale up evidence-based interventions. Dr. Arifeen serves on a number of Bangladesh’s technical and advisory committees as well as on global task/working groups. He holds an MBBS from Dhaka Medical College and an MPH and DrPH from Johns Hopkins University. He has published over 310 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals.