[4] LSTM is also a registered charity,[5] with a research portfolio exceeding £220 million, supported by funding from organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust.

[6] In partnership with the University of Liverpool, LSTM co-founded the Centre of Excellence in Infectious Diseases Research (CEIDR), which focuses on improving global healthcare and medical technologies.

Recognising the need for a solution to this problem Jones, together with a number of fellow business men and health pioneers, pledged an annual donation of £350 for three years to promote the study of tropical diseases in the city.

It was not long before the school, helped largely by private donations from individuals like Mary Kingsley (the author of "Travels in West Africa" and an expert in African culture), began to flourish.

Boyce then set about the business of appointing teaching staff and secured the services of Ronald Ross as the school's first lecturer in Tropical Medicine.

Other notable staff of the time included Joseph Everett Dutton who discovered one of the trypanosomes that cause sleeping sickness, Harold Wolferstan Thomas who developed the first effective treatment for the disease, and his collaborator Anton Breinl, who later became 'the father of tropical medicine' in Australia.

Thanks to this and other donations that it received the school was able to set up its own laboratory and teaching premises in Pembroke Place, separate from the University of Liverpool, upon whose facilities it had previously relied.

The laboratory was completed in 1914 but due to the advent of the war occupation of the building by LTSM was deferred and it was used as a Tropical Diseases Hospital offering courses to officers of the Royal Army Medical Corps.

This laboratory functioned continuously until the early stages of World War II and made many important discoveries in West Africa, including demonstrating that a species of black fly was responsible for transmission of filarial worm to humans, causing river blindness.

The Department also leads research into the development and scale-up of large scale, complex interventions to prevent the spread of HIV and houses the rapidly expanding Centre for Maternal and Newborn Health.

Specific areas of interest include clinical infectious disease epidemiology, developing preventative and therapeutic strategies for respiratory infections, and improving child and adolescent health.

Understanding mosquito behaviour, evolutionary genomics and the extent, causes and impact of insecticide resistance on malaria control is major research strength of the department.

This Department has long been one of the world's premier sites of research on African Animal Trypanosomiasis (AAT, nagana), the major livestock disease in Africa.

[17] The Mary Kingsley Medal was instituted by LSTM co-founder John Holt in 1903 and is awarded for outstanding contributions in the field of tropical medicine.

[18] Recipients of the award include Patrick Manson, David Bruce, Waldemar Haffkine, Bernard Nocht, Hans Vogel, and Frederick Vincent Theobald.