Devi Sridhar: Governing global health

Biography

Devi Sridhar, 32, jokes that she won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford by going to a Barnes & Noble bookshop and reading the Idiot’s Guides to world conflicts and philosophy—“a great basic education.” Now professor and chair in global public health at Edinburgh University, she had in fact graduated from university in Miami at 18 (having been born and brought up there), so it’s unlikely that the Idiot’s Guides were needed. At Oxford she was first a research fellow at All Souls College then associate professor from 2007 to 2012, and her research has focused on the governance and financing of global health. Her latest book, Governing Global Health, was co-written with Chelsea Clinton and is published this week by Oxford University Press.