Amitabha Sarkar

I am a Public Health academic and practitioner. My research and work are instrumental in the field of public health, epidemiology, international development and sustainability to design, plan and implement health systems to withstand ecological, social, political and economic predicaments. I am trained in social epidemiology, and broadly follow the methods of systems thinking and design science to innovate solutions for the problems concerned of contemporary global public health. I did my PhD in Public Health from the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). It is on the policy processes of World Bank’s investments in health systems since 1975 and the evolving mechanisms of development assistance (available at the World Bank Group Library in Washington, 2020; pp. XVII + 494). During the COVID-19 pandemic, I worked with the Department of Global Health in the Peking University as a China India Visiting Scholar to prepare the South Asia Public Health Preparedness Action Plan. I was a recipient of the Swiss Government Excellence Fellow in the field of Global Public Health for the year of 2022 – 2023, and deputed at the Global Health Centre in the Geneva Graduate Institute (The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies). I am currently a Research Fellow at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) in Geneva. Amongst my other roles, I am an honorary Research Affiliate at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in the Geneva Graduate Institute, and serve in the WHO’s global pool of experts for Universal Health Coverage monitoring and health systems performance assessment.  

I am currently studying international endeavours (such as the Pandemic Agreement negotiation and International Health Regulations amendment) with the advent of COVID 19 pandemic to understand changes in public health policy, planning and capacity development strategies. I offer teaching courses on Strategic Health Policy (in autumn), and Global Health Methods (in spring) .