Devi Sridhar

Sridhar investigated the international response to the West African Ebola virus epidemic, and what reforms were needed to heal a global system for outbreak response. She partnered with the Harvard Global Health Institute and London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine to independently analyse the global response. She established ten essential reforms to prevent and respond to the next pandemic. In 2014, at the age of thirty, Sridhar was promoted to full Professor and Chair at the University of Edinburgh and became the founding Director of the Global Health Governance Programme. She works between Edinburgh Medical School and the Blavatnik School of Government. Sridhar compiled the first Wellcome Trust Open Research Collection on the topic of Global Public Health. She is concerned by the rise of chronic disease, drug-resistant infection and funding for primary healthcare.

In 2011 Sridhar was appointed to Wolfson College, Oxford, as an Associate Professor in global health politics. She serves on the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Health Industry. She started to research the rise of public–private partnerships in global health governance, and how, whilst they are crucial to combat infectious disease, their non-transparent accountability and effectiveness should be investigated. International organisations are redirected by specific incentives, and the asymmetry of information sharing between member states and groups like the World Health Organization or World Bank limits their impact. She worked with Chelsea Clinton and used principal agent theory to study the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the GAVI Alliance. She worked with Julio Frenk on the need for an independent and impartial World Health Organization.

From 2008 Sridhar was a postdoctoral fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Her first book, The Battle Against Hunger, was selected by Foreign Affairs as a must read book in aid policy. The book investigated the World Bank funded nutrition programme based in India, which became a blueprint for air programmes despite evidence for its effectiveness. Sridhar was concerned that the programme did not address the social conditions that cause undernutrition in India.

Sridhar was born and raised in Miami, Florida. In 2003, at the age of eighteen, she enrolled in an honors medical programme and earned a bachelor's degree in biology at the University of Miami. She says she was inspired by her grandmother, who raised her children in the 1960s before completing her DPhil and writing several books. Sridhar was a graduate student at the University of Oxford, where she was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. Her dissertation considered malnutrition in India. She turned down a funded position at Harvard Law School to join the University of Oxford Global Economic Governance Programme in 2006, where she was awarded both MPhil and DPhil degrees.

Devi Lalita Sridhar (born 1984) is a Professor and Chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh. Her research considers the effectiveness of public health interventions and how to improve developmental assistance for health.