Dr Luisa Enria has been awarded the annual Sanjaya Lall Prize for the best article published in Oxford Development Studies in the preceding year’s issue. The Board of Oxford Development Studies awards a £500 prize to honor the memory of the late Professor Sanjaya Lall, who was a former editor of the journal.

The prize comes to reward her article ‘Unsettled Authority and Humanitarian Practice: Reflections on Local Legitimacy from Sierra Leone’s Borderlands’. Based on research on the 2014-2016 West African Ebola outbreak, it provides great insights on community engagement and relates to some of the proposals she is developing with her fellow members of the coalition’s Social Science Working Group.

Dr Luisa Enria  is an Assistant Professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Her research focuses on ethnographic approaches to conflict, humanitarian interventions, and global health, particularly in West Africa. In 2015 she was deployed as an anthropologist to support the response to the West African Ebola outbreak, carrying out 14 months of fieldwork in Northern Sierra Leone to research community experiences of the epidemic and its response, and in particular, perspectives on the Ebola vaccine trials. Since then, her work has focused on outbreak preparedness and response, community engagement with clinical research, and the politics of emergency and crisis management. Alongside this work, she has developed applied social science trainings for a range of audiences, including for community health workers to conduct research on vaccine hesitancy and, more recently, local experiences of COVID-19.

Dr Luisa Enria was recently a panellist in the webinar COVID-19 vaccine development: Lessons learned from social science research and community engagement in clinical trials in low-resource settings. The recording is available here.