International Advisory Board

Victor J. Dzau, a McGill alumnus, is the former President of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), formerly the Institute of Medicine (IOM). In addition, he served as Vice Chair of the National Research Council (2014-2026). On July 1, 2026, he returned to Duke University as James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Chancellor Emeritus and Director of the Mandel Center. Previously, he was CEO of Duke Health System and chairman of medicine at both Harvard and Stanford Universities. He is one of the most influential leaders in health and is recognized globally for a highly decorated career as a physician scientist, administrator, and leader. His research laid the foundation for lifesaving drugs known as ACE inhibitors. Dzau has devoted his career to scientific innovation, global health, and equity. At NAM, he has launched initiatives on a global health risk framework, human gene editing, and climate change and health. Dzau has served in advisory and leadership capacities for governments, academia, international multilateral bodies, including G7 and G20, on strategies and policies on health and biomedical research; he chairs scientific advisory boards for biomedical research councils and institutes, including in the United Kingdom, Singapore, Japan, Qatar, and Canada. Among his many honors are the Order of the Rising Sun from Japan, Honorary Citizen of Singapore, Gustav Nylin Medal from the Swedish Royal College of Medicine, Henry Freisen International Prize. He has received 23 honorary doctorates.

Michele Barry, M.D, DTM, FACP, FASTMH, is the Drs. Ben and A. Jess Shenson Professor of Medicine and Tropical Diseases at Stanford University. She is the Director of the Center for Innovation in Global Health and Senior Associate Dean for Global Health. A leading voice for advancing women’s leadership in medicine and global health, Barry is the founder of the Gates-funded international nonprofit WomenLift Health, a global leadership initiative for women in global health. She’s also an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, Council on Foreign Relations, American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Chair Emerita of the Board of Directors for the Consortium of Universities for Global Health and is a past President of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. She has published in the areas of climate’s impact on health, ethical issues of overseas collaborative research, tropical diseases, global health policies and refugee health.

Dr. Myron Cohen is the Yeargan-Bate Eminent Professor of Medicine, Microbiology and Immunology and Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. He serves as the associate vice chancellor for global health at the university, and director for the Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases (IGHID). Dr. Cohen received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Rush Medical College in 2000, the lifetime achievement award from the American Sexually Transmitted Diseases Association and the O. Max Gardner Award, the highest honor in the University of North Carolina System. In 2013, Dr. Cohen received the Smadel Award from the Infectious Disease Society in recognition of his work in public health and the Award for Science from the State of North Carolina, its highest civilian honor. He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians and the Infectious Disease Society of America, and a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Society of Clinical Investigation and the American Association of Physicians. Dr. Cohen serves as the co-principal investigator of the NIH HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN). Dr. Cohen’s research focuses on the transmission and prevention of transmission of HIV. Dr. Cohen is the architect and Principal Investigator of the multinational HPTN 052 trial, which demonstrated that antiretroviral treatment of people with HIV infection prevents the sexual transmission of the virus. Science Magazine recognized this work as the “Breakthrough of the Year” in 2011.

Professor John W. Frank MD, CCFP, MSc, FRCPC, FCAHS, FFPH, FRSE, LLD: Currently Professorial Fellow, University of Edinburgh Medical School (2008- present). Previous academic and research leadership positions: Professor (now Emeritus) University of Toronto (1983-present); founding Director of Research, the Institute for Work & Health in Toronto (1991-1997); inaugural Scientific Director, Canadian Institutes of Health Research - Institute of Population and Public Health (2000-2008); founding Director, Edinburgh-based MRC Unit: Scottish Collaboration for Public Health Research and Policy. Career publications: >300; h-factor: 63 (Google Scholar). Expertise: epidemiology of health inequalities, chronic disease prevention and environmental hazards (especially radio-frequency electromagnetic fields).

Dr. George Hripcsak, MD, MS, is Vivian Beaumont Allen Professor at Columbia University’s Department of Biomedical Informatics. He is a board-certified internist with degrees in chemistry, medicine, and biostatistics. Dr. Hripcsak is interested in the clinical information stored in electronic health records and their use in improving health care. Health record data are sparse, irregularly sampled, complex, and biased. Using causal inference, nonlinear time series analysis, machine learning, knowledge engineering, and natural language processing, he is developing the methods necessary to produce reliable medical evidence from the data. Dr. Hripcsak has a long track record of developing, implementing, and studying informatics interventions to improve health care, and he has published frequently on evaluation in biomedical informatics. Dr. Hripcsak leads the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) coordinating center; OHDSI is an international network with thousands of collaborators from 88 countries and health records on almost one billion unique patients. In precision medicine, he serves as a PI on Columbia’s eMERGE grant and as site PI on Columbia’s role on the All of Us Research Program Data and Research Center. He co-chaired the Meaningful Use Workgroup of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’s Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology. Dr. Hripcsak is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American College of Medical Informatics, the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics, and the New York Academy of Medicine. He was awarded the highest honor by the American College of Medical Informatics, the 2022 Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence. He has over 500 publications.

Sheila Jasanoff is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School. A pioneer in the social sciences, she explores the role of science and technology in the law, politics, and policy of modern democracies. Her books include The Fifth Branch, Science at the Bar, Designs on Nature, The Ethics of Invention, and Can Science Make Sense of Life? She founded and directs the STS Program at Harvard, where she also formed the Science and Democracy Network; previously, she was founding chair of the STS Department at Cornell. In 2022, she received the Government of Norway’s Holberg Prize for law, humanities, and social sciences. Her other honors include the SSRC’s Hirschman prize, the Humboldt Foundation’s Reimar-Lüst award, a distinguished scholar award from ISA’s Science, Technology and Art in International Relations, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Jasanoff has held distinguished visiting professorships at leading universities in Europe, Asia, Australia, and the US. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, international member of the British Academy and the Royal Danish Academy, and member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She served on the AAAS Board of Directors and as President of the Society for Social Studies of Science. She holds AB, JD, and PhD degrees from Harvard, and honorary doctorates from the Universities of Twente and Liège.

Michael Merson, M.D. is founding Chair and Professor of Global and Environmental Health at New York University School of Global Public Health. He is the William Joklik Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Medicine and Global Health at Duke University, where he served as the founding director of the Duke Global Health Institute, Vice President and Vice Provost for Global Affairs and Vice Chancellor for Duke-National University of Singapore Affairs. Prior to this he was the Anna Lauder Professor of Public Health at Yale University and its first Dean of Public Health. Before entering academia Dr. Merson served as director of three global programs at the World Health Organization in Geneva.

Dr. Merson has authored over 180 articles, is senior editor of the textbook “Global Health: Disease, Programs, Systems, and Policies” and co-author of The AIDS Pandemic: Searching for a Global Response. His research interests are identifying ways to increase access to new vaccines and treatments in low and middle countries and designing new approaches to global health governance and financing. He has served in advisory capacities for many international organizations and private sector entities. He has two honorary degrees and is a member of the National Academy of Medicine.

Dr. Christopher J.L. Murray is Professor and Chair of the Department of Health Metrics Sciences at the University of Washington and Director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). His career has focused on improving population health worldwide through better evidence. A physician and health economist, his work has led to the development of innovative methods to strengthen health measurement, analyze the performance of health systems, understand the drivers of health, and produce forecasts of the future state of health.

He leads the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) collaboration, a systematic effort to quantify the comparative magnitude of health loss due to diseases, injuries, and risk factors by age, sex, and geography over time. The GBD generates assessments for more than 370 diseases and injuries and 88 risk factors for 204 countries and territories and for subnational units in 20 countries. He also led critical analyses during the COVID-19 pandemic to understand its impact on health systems and the population as a whole, and the effectiveness of policy interventions to mitigate it.

Francis Omaswa is the founding executive director of the African Centre for Global Health and Social Transformation, an initiative incorporated in Uganda and promoted by a network of African and international leaders in health and development. Until May 2008, he was special adviser to the WHO director general and founding executive director of the Global Health Workforce Alliance. Before joining GHWA, he was the director general for health services in the Ministry of Health in Uganda, where he was responsible for coordinating and implementing major reforms in the health sector, including quality assurance and decentralization.

Among Dr. Omaswa’s many accomplishments and leadership roles in the global health community, he was founding chair, and later served as vice chairman, of the global Stop TB partnership; was one of the architects of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria; and served as chair of the portfolio and procurement committee of the Global Fund board; was a member of the steering committee of the High Level Forum on health-related MDGs; and participated in the drafting the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness.

Dr. Omaswa is a graduate of Makerere Medical School, Kampala, Uganda, a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, founding president of the College of Surgeons of East, Central and Southern Africa, and is a senior associate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and an overseas member of the National Academy of Medicine in the United States.

Prof. K. Srinath Reddy, a cardiologist and epidemiologist by training, is the founder past President of the Public Health Foundation of India (2006-2022). He presently serves as an Honorary Distinguished Professor of PHFI. Under his leadership, PHFI established five Indian Institutes of Public Health, to advance multi-disciplinary education and research for multi-sectoral application. He was earlier Head of Cardiology at the All Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi. Prof. Reddy was the first Bernard Lown Visiting Professor of Global Cardiovascular Health at Harvard (2009-13) and is presently an Adjunct Professor at Harvard, Emory, Sydney and Pennsylvania universities. He is the first Indian to be elected as an International Member of the US National Academy of Medicine. He was President of the World Heart Federation (2013-14) and is co-chair of the Health Thematic Group of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He chaired the High-Level Expert Group on Universal Health Coverage constituted by the Planning Commission of India (2010-11).  He is a member of the Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition. He has served on several expert panels of the World Health Organisation, Indian and international scientific agencies. He is an Advisor on Health to the state governments of Odisha and Andhra Pradesh, with a cabinet rank. Prof. Reddy has 575 scientific publications in peer reviewed Indian and international journals. He has published two books “Make Health in India - Reaching a Billion Plus” and “Pulse to Planet: Long Lifeline of Human Health”. Among the several honours received by him are the WHO Director General’s Award and the Luther Terry Medal of the American Cancer Association for ‘outstanding contributions to global tobacco control, the Queen Elizabeth Medal for Health Promotion and Padma Bhushan, the prestigious civilian award conferred by the President of India.  

Jeanette Vega Morales is a Medical Doctor and Pediatrician from the University of Chile. Doctor of Public Health graduated at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has more than 20 years of experience in managerial positions at national and international levels. In Chile, she has served as Undersecretary of Health, as Director of the National Health Insurance Agency and as Minister of Social Development and Family. Internationally, she has served as Director of the Department of Poverty, Equity and Determinants of Health at WHO, and as Global Health Director at The Rockefeller Foundation Dr. Vega has been involved with many international agencies in various capacities. She has served as temporary advisor to the World Health Organization. In addition, she continues to hold several board positions. She is a regular speaker or keynote speaker at international meetings and speaks at different national and international forums. Currently she serves as a Senior Adviser to the Minister of Health in Chile.

Tina S. Alster, MD is the founding director of the Washington Institute of Dermatologic Laser Surgery and is a clinical professor of dermatology at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, DC as well as consulting associate of dermatology at Duke University. She received her B.S. and M.D. degrees with highest honors from Duke University and completed her dermatology residency at Yale University.

Dr. Alster is a world-recognized leader in dermatologic laser surgery and is credited with having written the first textbook on cosmetic laser surgery. She has since published hundreds of articles and 7 additional textbooks on the subject.

Dr. Alster has held and maintains leadership and board positions in numerous professional and national organizations including the American Society for Dermatologic Surgery (ASDS), American Society for Laser Medicine & Surgery (ASLMS), Women’s Dermatologic Society (WDS), among others. She served on the Board of Visitors at Duke University School of Medicine, on the Board of Directors for Ford’s Theatre, and as a consultant to several skin care and device companies, including Lancôme and La Mer. Her commitment to teaching and mentoring others is evident in the hundreds of physicians she has trained in her career as well as her establishment of scholarship endowments for women pursuing careers in medicine at Duke University and a cosmetic dermatology resident education fund at Yale University.

Dr. Liu is a Canadian practicing paediatric emergency physician at the University of Montreal and Professor at McGill University’s School of Population & Global Health where she focuses on pandemic and health emergencies. She is the director of the Pandemic & Emergency Readiness Lab. Prior to joining McGill, Dr. Liu began her career with Médecins Sans Frontières  (MSF)/Doctors Without Borders (DWB) in 1996. The organization is a world-recognized authority on medical humanitarian crises. She undertook over 30 field assignments, coordinating emergency medical aid and responding to humanitarian and health emergencies, including outbreaks/epidemics in Central Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, South East Asia, and the Caribbean & Central America.   

She went on to serve as the International President of MSF for over six years from 2013-2019.   At the helm of MSF, she has been a leading voice on medical humanitarian crises. During the   2014 Ebola crisis, MSF warned the United Nations (UN) General Assembly about the danger of the world’s “coalition of inaction”. In 2015, the destruction of MSF’s hospital in Kunduz,   Afghanistan, triggered the organization’s appeal to the UN Security Council, and the subsequent adoption of UN Resolution 2286 condemning such attacks. She has engaged with world leaders at the highest levels.  

Other Liu’s operational work has ranged from introducing comprehensive care for survivors of sexual violence, to developing a telemedicine platform for connecting doctors in rural areas with specialists worldwide.   

Dr. Liu graduated from the McGill University School of Medicine in Montreal in 1991 and did her paediatric specialty training at the University of Montreal. She holds a Fellowship in Paediatric Emergency Medicine from New York University School of Medicine as well as an International Master’s in Health Leadership, also from McGill University. She remains a practicing doctor,   both in the field with MSF and also through hospital shifts in her hometown of Montreal.   

Dr. Liu is currently a member of the Independent Panel on Pandemic Preparedness and Response, established by the World Health Organization (WHO) to provide an evidence-based path for the future, ensuring that countries and global institutions effectively address health threats.   She is the chair of the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, an international organization of peace mediation. She is a Commissioner on three Lancet Commissions:   NUS-Lancet Pandemic Readiness, Implementation, Monitoring and Evaluation (PRIME), Commission and Health, CHH- Lancet Commission on Conflict and Forced Displacement & Promoting resilience, Preparedness, Adaptation and Response to Climate in Complex Crises.