Charles Newton was born in Kenya, qualified in Cape Town, South Africa, with postgraduate training in Paediatrics in Manchester and London, United Kingdom. As a lecturer at University of Oxford, he returned to Kilifi Kenya in 1989, to help set up a unit to study severe malaria in African children. Thereafter he spent 2 years as a post-doctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins, USA; studying mechanisms of brain damage in central nervous system infections.

He completed his training in Paediatric Neurology at Great Ormond Street Hospital, and Queens Square in London, UK. In 1998 he was awarded a Wellcome Trust Senior Clinical Fellowship at University College London, to return to Kilifi, to study CNS infections in children. He conducts research on CNS infections in children; epidemiological studies of epilepsy and neurological impairment; tetanus, jaundice, and sepsis in neonates. In 2011 he took up a professorship in Psychiatry at the University of Oxford to concentrate of Neurodevelopmental Disorders, Epilepsy, and mental illness disorders (particularly Psychosis and Depression) in Africa.