Webster Mavhu joined Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) in 2017 as an honorary research fellow. He became a Senior Lecturer and then Reader in Global Health and Social science. Webster initially trained as a Linguistic Anthropologist in Zimbabwe. He also attained a master’s in Development Studies from Leeds University and a PhD in Social Science and Public Health from University College London.

He has a joint appointment between LSTM and the Centre for Sexual Health and HIV/AIDS Research in Zimbabwe. Webster was the Deputy Executive Director of the Centre for Sexual Health and HIV/AIDS Research between 2012 and 2023, before becoming Director (Sexual and Reproductive Health and Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health) in 2024.

He was awarded a National Institute for Health and Care Research-Wellcome Global Health Partnership Intermediate Fellowship to conduct research to promote positive masculinity and sexual health among very young adolescents in Zimbabwe. He was also awarded a Templeton World Charity Foundation grant to examine and measure how an intervention can help adolescents living with HIV flourish within their communities by developing the character strengths embedded within the indigenous concept of Zvandiri (Accept Me as I Am).

Webster has over 80 peer-reviewed publications and has been an invited speaker at international meetings including the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in the US and International AIDS Society conferences. In 2020, he was awarded an Aspen New Voices Fellowship. This highly competitive US programme equips frontline development experts with skills to illuminate crucial perspectives to champion policy change.

Webster has an established international reputation as a researcher and his studies have impact at their core. Since 2005, he has run trials and led process evaluations for a range of complex interventions working at the interface between vulnerability, sexual and reproductive health, HIV and mental health in South and Eastern Africa, including on behalf of Ministries of Health and UN agencies. Webster has been a principal investigator/co-principal investigator on research initiatives relating to adolescent wellbeing as well as men, masculinities and health.

One of the trials he led tested the effectiveness of peer-supported care for adolescents living with HIV, the age group with the highest morbidity and mortality. The trial was the first to demonstrate that peer-supported differentiated care for HIV can successfully impact HIV treatment outcomes (with a 42% reduction in virological suppression in the treatment arm). The findings were immediately taken up by the World Health Organisation to support their adolescent HIV treatment guidelines. The intervention has been expanded across Africa and taken up by a range of implementers. A follow-on Templeton World Charity Foundation funded initiative explores the psychological constructs that contributed to virological suppression.

Webster was also a co-investigator on the Medical Research Council funded trial comparing the effectiveness of the original Friendship Bench (a low-threshold psychological intervention delivered by lay health workers) with an adapted version delivered by youth lay health workers in Zimbabwe. Since 2010, he has collaborated with researchers from Africa, Europe, the US, Asia and Australia. This network continues to grow through linkages and referrals.