Professor Devi Sridhar

Devi Sridhar is the Professor and Chair of Global Public Health at Edinburgh University Medical School. A leading expert on international public health funding, organisation, and security, she is also the Founding Director of the university’s Global Health Governance Programme, and is a holder of a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award, aimed at helping researchers to tackle the most important questions in science.

After graduating from university in her native Miami at just eighteen, Devi became the youngest-ever American Rhodes Scholar. She earned her post-graduate degree and doctorate at Oxford before becoming a research fellow and later an Associate Professor in Global Health Politics and Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford.

Devi is a leading researcher and commentator on the relationship between health and wealth. She has led acclaimed research into aid programmes and the global healthcare industry, as well as the rise of drug-resistant infections and how healthcare is funded. Working with the Harvard Global Health Institute and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, she and her team have tested the effectiveness of the responses to, and the lessons from the West African Ebola epidemic. Years before the Covid-19 pandemic she raised the alarm over the potential of an animal-to-human infection travelling from China. She has since been a leading critic of delays to and shortcomings in lockdowns and other government responses to the disease.

Devi is the co-author, with Chelsea Clinton, of Governing Global Health: Who Runs the World and Why?, an examination of how international organisations have tried to battle diseases from Aids to malaria. She is also the author of The Battle Against Hunger: Choice, Circumstance and the World Bank, a look at the flaws in the models used to combat hunger in the poorest parts of the world. In Preventable, Devi tells the tells the story of COVID-19 and how global politics shape our health. It was a Sunday Times bestseller and Radio 4’s Book of the Week.

Devi has served on the board of Save the Children UK, the World Economic Forum Council on the Health Industry, and the Wellcome Trust’s Expert review group. A regular across the media, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic, she has appeared on the BBC World Service and Radio 4, CNN, and Channel 4 News. She has also written for The Guardian, Nature, The Lancet, Science, and the British Medical Journal.