Pedro L. Alonso, PhD

Director, Global Malaria Programme, World Health Organization

Dr Pedro L. Alonso is the Director of the WHO Global Malaria Programme in Geneva, Switzerland. The Global Malaria Programme is responsible for the coordination of WHO’s global efforts to control and eliminate malaria and sets evidence-based norms, standards, policies and guidelines to support malaria-affected countries around the world. A national of Spain, Dr Alonso has spent over 30 years in public health. His scientific research work has focused on key determinants of morbidity and mortality in the most vulnerable population groups. He has published over 300 articles in international peer-reviewed journals—primarily on malaria treatment, vaccine trials, and preventive therapies—and has served on several national and international committees. He is committed to capacity building of both institutions and individuals, primarily in Africa.

Prior to assuming his role with the WHO, Dr Alonso was Director of the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), Professor of Global Health at the University of Barcelona, and President of the Governing Board of the Manhiça Foundation and the Manhiça Health Research Center in Mozambique.

Marcia Castro, PhD

Andelot Professor of Demography, Chair, Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Marcia Castro is Andelot Professor of Demography and Chair of the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is also associate faculty at the Harvard University Center for the Environment and the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. At Harvard, she serves as a member of the Faculty Advisory Committee of the Brazil Studies Program, a member of the Executive Committee of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and a member of the Center for Geographic Analysis Steering Committee.

Professor Castro’s research focuses on the identification of social, biological, and environmental risks associated with vector-borne diseases in the tropics, with the ultimate goal of informing the planning, implementation, and evaluation of control interventions. From 2004­–2010, she worked with the Dar es Salaam Urban Malaria Control Program to promote the use of environmental management approaches and larviciding to improve urban health. Professor Castro is currently conducting a study to evaluate the use of larviciding in fish ponds in the Brazilian Amazon, and she is part of the Amazonia International Center of Excellence in Malaria Research, funded by the National Institutes of Health. Professor Castro is also working on the epidemiology and impacts of arboviruses (dengue, Zika virus, and chikungunya) in Brazil, on issues of human mobility and asymptomatic malaria infections in the Brazilian Amazon, as well as on the potential impacts of extreme climatic events on malaria transmission in the Amazon. Her research interests include assessing the impact of human mobility and asymptomatic infections in the pattern and level of malaria transmission; testing a new strategy to identify residual reservoirs of P. vivax in areas of declining transmission; evaluating the role of behavior change communication campaigns in malaria control; and modeling the impact of extreme climatic events on the transmission of malaria.

Professor Castro earned a bachelor’s degree in Statistics from Rio de Janeiro State University, a master’s degree in Demography from Minas Gerais Federal University, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Demography from Princeton University. Professor Castro received a Mentoring award in 2011, the Alice Hamilton award in 2014, and was the 2018 recipient of the Roger L. Nichols Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Prosper Chaki, PhD

Chief Executive Director and Research Director, Pan-African Mosquito Control Association

Dr Chaki is Chief Executive Director and Research Scientist at the Pan-African Mosquito Control Association (PAMCA). He received a doctorate in Tropical Infectious Diseases at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. He spent most of his time designing and evaluating affordable community-based strategies for monitoring and evaluation of programmatic malaria vector control and surveillance in both urban and rural settings across Africa. He has a broad background in working with the local communities, districts, and programs supporting evidence-driven decision making, intervention stratification, and deployment. In some of his past work, he investigated the influence of some specific environmental and interventional determinants to operational programs with a keen interest in larval source management and in collaboration with other researchers at the Ifakara Health Institute investigated the epidemiological impact of larval control through microbial larvicide application and effective community engagement strategies for sustainable vector control interventions.

He further coordinated the malaria risk mapping initiative and collaboratively helped establish the largest quality assured entomological surveillance system covering 186 villages across mainland Tanzania for evaluating the ongoing interventions and promote evidence-driven delivery of vector control programs in Tanzania. In addition, Dr Chaki is interested in innovations for accelerating malaria elimination, particularly novel tools for addressing the current and emerging challenges with mosquito vector control such as outdoor biting mosquito vectors that seem to be at the center of the malaria transmission question at the moment. He is further committed to harnessing the African based entomological capacity to spearhead capacity building for implementing vector control programs through establishing a strong coordination mechanism through regional partnerships and knowledge exchange programs.

Margaret Chan, MD

Inaugural Dean, Vanke School of Public Health, Tsinghua University, People’s Republic of China and Emeritus Director-General, World Health Organization

Dr Margaret Chan, from the People’s Republic of China, earned her medical degree from the University of Western Ontario in Canada. She joined the Hong Kong Department of Health in 1978, where her career in public health began. In 1994, Dr Chan was appointed Director of Health of Hong Kong, the first woman to hold that position. In her nine-year tenure as director, she launched new services to prevent the spread of disease and promote better health. She also introduced new initiatives to improve communicable disease surveillance and response, enhance training for public health professionals, and establish better local and international collaboration. She effectively managed outbreaks of avian influenza and of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).

In 2003, Dr Chan joined WHO as Director of the Department for Protection of the Human Environment. In June 2005, she was appointed Director, Communicable Diseases Surveillance and Response, as well as Representative of the Director-General for Pandemic Influenza. In September 2005, she was named Assistant Director-General for Communicable Diseases. Dr Chan was elected to the post of Director-General on 9 November 2006. The Assembly appointed Dr Chan for a second five-year term at its sixty-fifth session in May 2012. Dr Chan’s last term began on 1 July 2012 and ended on 30 June 2017. On 2 April 2020, Dr Chan was appointed inaugural Dean of Vanke School of Public Health, Tsinghua University, China.

Junhu Chen, PhD

Professor and Chief, Key Laboratory of Parasite and Vector Biology, National Institute of Parasitic Diseases, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, People’s Republic of China

Professor Junhu Chen began his career at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institute of Parasitic Diseases in 2012. In 2015, he was named Vice-Chief and named Chief and Principal Investigator in 2016. His malaria research experience and knowledge span the fields of cellular biology, molecular diagnosis, population genetics, and immunology. He has published more than 30 peer-reviewed papers in international journals.

Rachel Daniels, PhD

Senior Research Scientist, Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Dr Rachel Daniels is a Senior Research Scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. She works to identify biomarkers and develop technologies for deployment in varied settings. Her work on Plasmodium falciparum has resulted in novel SNP-based methods that uniquely identify and track individual parasite types. These tools have been applied in research settings across the globe for population surveillance and to identify parasite population changes in response to control efforts and changes in transmission. She has recently been working to translate these tools for decision-making by national malaria control programs. In particular, she is currently expanding the biomarker repertoire to better characterize the relatedness of parasites within populations and to assess how these and other genomic tools can be used for programmatic decision-making and elimination certification.

Mark C. Elliott, PhD

Vice Provost for International Affairs, Mark Schwartz Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History, Harvard University

Mark Elliott is Vice Provost of International Affairs at Harvard University and the Mark Schwartz Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and in the Department of History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.  As Vice Provost, Elliott oversees and works to advance international academic initiatives, extending the global reach of Harvard’s research and teaching activities. In this capacity, Elliott serves as the University’s representative in negotiating agreements with foreign governments, receiving senior-level international delegations, and representing Harvard to peer institutions and alumni worldwide. In addition, he shares responsibility for supporting the community of international students, scholars, and faculty in Cambridge and Boston, as well as for guiding Harvard’s overall global strategy and sustaining its ongoing development as a global university.

Elliott is an authority on the last four centuries of Chinese history, in particular the Qing period (1636-1911). His research encompasses the history of relations between China and its nomadic frontier, with special attention to questions of ethnicity and empire. His first book, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China, is a pioneering study in the “New Qing History,” an approach emphasizing the imprint of Inner Asian traditions upon China’s last imperial state. He is also the author of Emperor Qianlong: Son of Heaven, Man of the World, and has published more than twenty-five scholarly articles. He serves on numerous editorial boards and was for three years the director of the Fairbank Center of Chinese Studies. A graduate of Yale (BA 1981 summa cum laude, MA 1984), Elliott earned a doctorate in History at the University of California, Berkeley. He taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara and at the University of Michigan before coming to Harvard in 2003.

Wafaie Fawzi, PhD

Oppenheimer Interim Faculty Director, Harvard Center for African Studies; Richard Saltonstall Professor of Population Sciences, Professor of Nutrition, Epidemiology, and Global Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Wafaie Fawzi is the Richard Saltonstall Professor of Population Sciences and Professor of Nutrition, Epidemiology, and Global Health at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. He is currently serving as the Interim Oppenheimer Faculty Director of the Harvard Center for African Studies. The primary focus of his research is on the discovery and translation of interventions to enhance maternal and child health and development. Over the past 25 years, his group has led the design and implementation of more than 30 randomized controlled trials of maternal/neonatal and child/adolescent health, and infectious diseases, with emphasis on nutritional factors. They also undertake observational studies to understand the broader epidemiology of global health challenges, with a focus on developing countries in Africa and Asia. In the past 15 years, they have expanded their work to study the scale-up and translation of various interventions that have shown to be efficacious, and pursue this in partnerships that integrate multiple public health disciplines. Their findings are disseminated through more than 450 papers to date that Professor Fawzi has authored or co-authored.

George F. Gao, PhD

Director-General, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC), Vice President, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC); Director and Professor, CAS Key Laboratory of Pathogenic Microbiology and Immunology, Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences; and Dean, Medical School, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, People’s Republic of China

Gao is a world-leading virologist and immunologist who has made some significant contributions to the field. He is renowned for his scientific contributions to the understanding of the molecular recognition of immune receptors to their ligands and the molecular basis of the pathogenicity of pathogens, in particular, influenza viruses and other enveloped viruses, which provide insight into drug and antibody development and the prevention and control of infections worldwide. Gao earned his doctoral degree (DPhil) from Oxford University, United Kingdom, and completed postdoctoral studies at both Oxford University and Harvard University (with a brief stay in Calgary University). Gao worked at the Beijing Agricultural University (1986-1991), Oxford University (2001-2006), Institute of Microbiology, CAS (2004-2008, Director General). Gao is a member (academician) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (elected in 2013), a fellow of The Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS, also known as The World Academy of Sciences) (elected in 2014), a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology (AAM, elected in 2015); an associate (foreign) member of EMBO (The European Molecular Biology Organization) (elected in 2016), a fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (elected in 2016), a fellow of Royal Society of Edinburgh (elected in 2017), a fellow of African Academy of Sciences (elected in 2017), a member (academician) of International Eurasian Academy of Sciences (elected in 2018).

Gao’s research interests include virus entry/release mechanism and host immune receptor recognition. His group research is mainly focusing on the virus entry and release, especially influenza virus interspecies transmission (host jump), structure-based drug design, and structural immunology. He is also interested in virus ecology, especially the relationship between the influenza virus and migratory birds or live poultry markets and the bat-derived virus ecology and molecular biology. He has so far published over 500 peer-reviewed scientific papers and 20 books or book chapters, with an H-index of 70 (until April 2019). His research has recently expanded on public health policy and global health strategy. His heroic role in fighting against the Ebola outbreak in 2014 by spending two months (between September to November) during the peak outbreak in Sierra Leone, leading a China Mobile Test Laboratory, is highly appreciated worldwide. Gao’s contribution in science is not only for basic life/medical sciences but also for clinical-related preventive medical sciences and public health, which can be reflected from his ‘grand-slam’ publications in 5 top-niche scientific journals, i.e., Nature, Science, Cell, The Lancet, and The New England Journal of Medicine.

Jennifer Gardy, PhD

Deputy Director, Surveillance, Data, and Epidemiology in the Malaria Program, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Dr Jennifer Gardy joined the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Malaria team as deputy director, Surveillance, Data, and Epidemiology in February 2019. Before that, she spent ten years at the BC Centre for Disease Control and the University of British Columbia’s School of Population and Public Health, where she held the Canada Research Chair in Public Health Genomics. Her research focused on the use of genomics as a tool to understand pathogen transmission, and incorporated techniques drawn from genomics, bioinformatics, modeling, information visualization, and the social sciences.

In 2018, she was named one of BC’s Most Influential Women in STEM by BC Business Magazine and was named one of the Government of Canada’s 20 Women of Impact in STEM. In addition to her science work, Jennifer is also a science communicator, hosting many episodes of science documentary television for Canada’s national broadcast, as well as authoring science books for children, including a new book to be released in 2020.

Qi Gao, MD, PhD

Senior Professor, Jiangsu Institute of Parasitic Diseases, Professor, Suzhou University, People’s Republic of China

Professor Qi Gao is Senior Professor at the Jiangsu Institute of Parasitic Diseases, as well as adviser of the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborative Centre for Research and Training on Malaria Elimination. He is Chair of the National Malaria Expert Committee and Co-Chair of National Severe Malaria Diagnosis & Treatment Expert Committee in China. He is also a Member of the WHO Malaria Policy Advisory Committee (MPAC), Member of the director board of the Asia Pacific Leaders Malaria Alliance Secretariat (APLMA) and Co-Chair of the Surveillance and Response Working Group of Asia Pacific Malaria Elimination Network (APMEN). Professor Qi Gao served as Director of the Jiangsu Institute of Parasitic Diseases, Director of the National Key Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases of the Ministry of Health of China from 2005 to 2013 and Chair of APMEN Advisory Board Committee. He has worked on both malaria research and field control since 1983 and has wide experience on malaria control and elimination at sub-national, national, and international levels.

Bin Li, PhD

Vice Minister, National Health Commission, People’s Republic of China

Dr Justin M. Maeda is a Principal Medical Epidemiologist from Tanzania with more than 10 years of experience in health care delivery, public health programme implementation, project management, epidemiology and disease intelligence, public health research, administration, and public health leadership. He currently serves as Interim Head of the Division for Surveillance and Disease Intelligence at the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), where he provides strategic oversight for the continental surveillance efforts to support African Union Member States on early detection and to address public health events for the improvement of individual country and continental health security. Prior to his appointment, he served as Interim Head of the Division for Management and Administration at Africa CDC, where he provided administrative oversight for Africa CDC programmes, including resource tracking and mobilization, management, planning and budgeting, and programme monitoring and evaluation.

Dr Maeda has contributed to the achievement of sustainable health outcomes through the application of innovative tools and methodologies such as electronic supportive supervision tools, and designing and rolling out of disease surveillance strategies. He has also supported response to disease outbreaks using modern analytical methodologies and investigation approaches, coordinated large outbreak response missions and other public health emergencies, and supported countries in setting up public health emergency operations centres. Dr Maeda has vast experience in leadership, management and administration with the capability to lead large teams of close to 1000 personnel, large grants management, programme planning and management, and international diplomacy.

Before joining Africa CDC, Dr Maeda served at different capacities within and outside his country, including as a district medical officer (DMO) under the Government of Tanzania, medical response coordinator under the African Union Support to Ebola Outbreak in West Africa (ASEOWA), and consultant medical epidemiologist under the African Field Epidemiology Network (AFENET). He received the 2014 Director’s Award on Global Health Partnership from the US CDC, in recognition of his efforts in the fight against Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Dr Maeda holds a bachelor’s degree in Medicine and a master of science degree in Applied Epidemiology both from the University of Muhimbili, Tanzania.​

Daouda Ndiaye, PharmD, PhD

Professor and Head, Department of Parasitology and Mycology, Faculty of Medicine, Pharmacy, Cheikh Anta Diop University

Daouda Ndiaye is a Professor and Head of the Department of Parasitology and Mycology at Cheikh Anta Diop University (UCAD) in Dakar, Senegal. He is also Chief of UCAD’s LeDantec Teaching Hospital and Director of the International Research and Training Center on Infectious pathogen and Genomic (CRF-AG), and Senegal-Director of the Senegal Harvard Malaria Initiative. As a thesis director, he’s mentored numerous students and trainees, including more than 20 Doctorates in Pharmacy & Medicine, 10 Masters of Sciences, and 8 Doctorates of Philosophy. Professor Ndiaye has a strong track record and experience in managing African field site activities with extensive experience interacting with international collaborators and scientific bodies.

He has worked extensively with collaborators from other malaria-endemic countries and with partners from the US and Europe. He serves as a Councilor of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH) Committee on Global Health (ACGH); Malaria Diagnostic Technical Advisor at the World Health Organization (WHO); WHO Expert on Drug Resistance and Response; WHO Expert to the Malaria Elimination Certification Panel (MECP); WHO Malaria Expert member of the Technical Expert Group on Drug Treatment and Resistance; and recently appointed as an Expert on COVID-19 Traditional Medicine Clinical Trial for WHO’s Regional Office for Africa. Professor Ndiaye received training in malaria, molecular biology, and genomics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (Harvard Chan), in Boston, MA, USA from 2002 to 2007. Since 2010, he has served as a visiting scientist at the Harvard Chan and is an Advisor to the Board of Harvard University’s Defeating Malaria From the Genes to the Globe Initiative. He graduated from Cheikh Anta Diop University as a specialist in Parasitology in 1999, earned a Doctorate in Pharmacy degree in 2000, a Master’s degree in Science in 2003, and a Doctor of Philosophy in 2007. In 2020, he was named the Francophone Pharmacy Award Winner by the French Academy of Pharmacy.

Marcel Tanner, PhD

Professor of Epidemiology and Medical Parasitology, University of Basel; Adjunct Professor, Federal Institute of Technology; and President, Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences

Professor Marcel Tanner is Director Emeritus of the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (1997 to 2015) and is now President of the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences. He is Professor of Epidemiology and Medical Parasitology at the University of Basel and an Adjunct Professor at the Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland. He has lived and worked in Africa and Asia and has published extensively in many fields of health research (>650 original papers) and has received global recognition for his expertise in the field of infectious diseases research and control. He has served on several technical committees of the World Health Organization (WHO), including chair of the WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group on Eradication (SAGme). He was Co-investigator and Coordinator of the first African malaria vaccine trial in 1992 and participated as co-principal investigator in several major intervention trials on malaria and schistosomiasis. He developed a Swiss field laboratory to what is now the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania from 1981 to 1985 and when back in Europe as Programme Director from 1987 to 1997. He earned a doctoral degree in medical biology from the University of Basel and an MPH from the University of London.

Michelle A. Williams, PhD

Dean of the Faculty, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Angelopoulos Professor in Public Health and International Development, Harvard Chan School and Harvard Kennedy School

Michelle Williams is an internationally renowned epidemiologist and public health scientist, an award-winning educator, and a widely recognized academic leader. Prior to becoming Dean on July 1, 2016, she was Professor and Chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Program Leader of the Population Health and Health Disparities Research Programs at Harvard’s Clinical and Translational Sciences Center (Harvard Catalyst). The Dean’s scientific work places special emphasis in the areas of reproductive, perinatal, pediatric, and molecular epidemiology. She has extensive experience in carrying out large-scale, multidisciplinary research involving the collection and analysis of epidemiological data (e.g., sleep characteristics, physical activity, dietary intake, and environmental exposures) and biological specimens (e.g., blood-based biochemistry/biomarkers, flow cytometry, genetic variants, whole-genome expression of mRNA and miRNA), both domestically and internationally. Dean Williams has published more than 450 peer-reviewed research papers ranging from studies of modifiable behavioral and environmental determinants of adverse health outcomes to genetic and genomic studies of common complications of pregnancy and chronic disorders among children and adults. Dean Williams received an undergraduate degree in biology and genetics from Princeton University in 1984. She earned a Master’s degree in civil engineering from Tufts University, and Master’s and doctoral degrees in epidemiology from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Dyann F. Wirth, PhD

Richard Pearson Strong Professor of Infectious Diseases, Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Institute Member, Broad Institute of MIT/Harvard

Dyann F. Wirth, PhD, is Richard Pearson Strong Professor of Infectious Diseases at the Harvard T.H. School of Public Health, Faculty Chair of the Harvard Integrated Life Sciences Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, and an Institute Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. She is an expert in the molecular biology of infectious diseases who has provided new insights into how the malaria parasite has evolved, specifically in the areas of population biology, mechanisms of drug and insecticide resistance, and antigenicity. As head of the Harvard Malaria Initiative at the Harvard Chan and Harvard University’s Defeating Malaria: From the Genes to the Globe Initiative, Wirth has created a unique malaria research and training network that brings together scientists with expertise in molecular biology, genetics, genomics, population genetics, chemistry, cell biology, epidemiology, computational biology, and biostatistics, along with leading clinicians in infectious diseases and pathology.

Wirth and the members of her lab leverage genomic tools and novel approaches to better understand the fundamental biology of the malaria parasite and mechanisms of drug resistance. The long-term goal of this work is to understand basic molecular mechanisms in protozoan parasites with the goal of discovering and applying preventive and therapeutic interventions against infection. Wirth’s research is made possible through collaborative research partnerships with investigators, universities, and clinical centers in Africa, Asia, and Central and South America. She earned a doctoral degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a global leader in malaria research, Wirth is a member and current chair of the World Health Organization (WHO) Malaria Policy Advisory Committee (MPAC) and has maintained numerous leadership positions in the field. She is a fellow and past president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH), a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, and an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences. Wirth is also past chair of the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard Chan (2006–2018) and honored recipient of ASTMH’s Joseph Augustine LePrince Medal, BioMalPar’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and USF President’s Global Leadership Award. She has also served on the boards of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the Marine Biological Laboratory.

Ning Xiao, PhD

Deputy Director and Professor, National Institute of Parasitic Diseases, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China

Ning Xiao is Deputy Director and Professor of the National Institute of Parasitic Diseases, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Shanghai, China. He earned a doctoral degree in parasitology at Asahikawa Medical University in Japan. Professor Xiao works as one of the national program managers on parasitic disease control in China, with a focus on echinococcosis and malaria. He discovered a new Echinococcus species in the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau in 2005. He actively participates in global health and is currently coordinating two international cooperative projects. Professor Xiao is the STAG member of WHO-NTD, a member of RAI-RSC of the Global Fund, and vice-chair of TDR-JCB. He has worked as one of the technical leads on three international cooperation projects for malaria control, China-UK-Tanzania pilot project funded by the China-UK Global Health Support Programme, the China-Tanzania extension project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Australia-China-PNG trilateral project funded by Australia DFAT. As a team leader, he worked in Sierra Leone on public health technical support for one year. In the last 10 years, he has published 96 papers with 9 patents authorized.

Winnie Chi-Man Yip, PhD

Professor of the Practice of Global Health Policy and Economics, Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Winnie Yip is Professor of the Practice of Global Health Policy and Economics in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and also Director of the school-wide China Health Partnership. Earlier this year, she was named Acting Faculty Director at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University for the 2020-2021 academic year. Dr Yip was previously a Professor of Health Policy and Economics at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, and Senior Research Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, where she was director of the Global Health Policy Program. She earned a doctorate in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on 1) the design, implementation, and evaluation of systemic health care interventions, for improving affordable and equitable access to and the efficiency and quality of health care delivery, especially for the poor; 2) modeling and evaluating the effects of incentives on the behavior of providers (organization and individual) and patients. Yip’s research encompasses both why health systems fail and how to improve them for the benefit of the people they serve. Her approach typically involves large-scale social experimentation of health system interventions by using experimental design to integrate the transformation of financing, incentives, organization, and management.

With a network of Chinese universities, Dr Yip’s ongoing research projects cover over 25 million people in the low-income provinces in China. Yip often works in close collaboration with governments and she has extensive experience leading interdisciplinary teams with expertise in public health, economics, political economy, evaluation science, epidemiology, quality of care, marketing science, and management. In addition to China, she has studied and advised health care reforms in the wider Asia region, including Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, and she has extensive experience in executive training courses for senior health policymakers. She was the founding director of the Asia Network for Health System Strengthening. Yip has served as an adviser to many international agencies, including the World Bank and the World Health Organization, and notably to the most recent World Bank’s Healthy China study that top Chinese leaders have accepted into their next Five-Year Plan on Health. She has also been a member of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network and the National Academy of Medicine’s Standing Committee on Health Systems Strengthening. She is a Senior Editor of Social Science and Medicine (Health Policy editorial office), Associate Editor of Health Economics and Health Systems & Reform, and serves on the editorial board for several other health policy publications. She has published extensively in top policy and economics journals, such as the Lancet, Health Economics. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Health Result Innovation Trust Fund (HRITF) of the World Bank, the European Union Commission, the Economics and Social Science Research Council.

Xiao-Nong Zhou, PhD

Director and Professor, National Institute of Parasitic Diseases, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, People’s Republic of China

Professor Xiao-Nong Zhou is Director of the National Institute of Parasitic Diseases at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention—a World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Tropical Diseases. He also serves as Chairman of the Parasitic Disease Subcommittee for China National Health Standards Committee, and the Chair of the WHO Western Pacific Region Programme Review Group (RPRG) on Neglected Tropical Diseases. He is also a member of the Advisory Committee of the Special Program for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases (WHO/TDR). He is Chief Editor for the Chinese Journal of Schistosomiasis Control (Chinese national journal) and Infectious Diseases of Poverty (BioMed Central as publisher). He graduated with a doctoral degree from Copenhagen University, Denmark, in 1994. He was named a National Outstanding Contribution Expert by the Ministry of Health in 2008, received the Public Health and Preventive Medicine Development Contribution Award of the Chinese Preventive Medicine Association in 2010, and named Shanghai Outstanding Academic Leader in 2011, respectively.

He has worked on parasitic disease prevention and control for more than 30 years, and his professional works are across the fields of ecology, population biology, and epidemiology of tropical diseases. He has led over 10 research projects in collaboration with multiple institutions at national and international levels, including Major Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, National Science and Technology Major Project, projects with WHO and International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada, in the fields of climate change, control strategies, determinants and innovative modeling of disease transmission, and intervention assessment. He has been invited to make keynote speeches or reports at more than 50 international academic conferences, participated in the compilation and publication of 8 monographs, and won 2 provincial and ministerial first prizes, 5 the second prizes, and 2 the third prizes. He has written extensively on parasitology and parasitic diseases, with over 200 peer-review publications in international journals, including New Engl. J. Med., Lancet, and Lancet Infect. Dis., etc.