As Assistant Director-General of Health Promotion, Disease Prevention and Care, Jeremy Farrar leads WHO's work on communicable and noncommunicable diseases, health through the life course, health promotion and social determinants of health, nutrition and food safety, migration and health, and the impacts of the environment and climate change on health.
Between 2023 and 2025 Dr Farrar was the Chief Scientist at WHO.
Prior to joining WHO, Dr Farrar was Director of Wellcome for 10 years. He oversaw a series of major reforms and growth, with Wellcome now collaborating with partners around the world focused on fundamental discovery science and three challenge areas: Climate and health, Infectious diseases, and Mental health, all with a commitment to ensuring that equity, diversity and inclusion are central to the science they support.
Before joining Wellcome, Dr Farrar spent over 17 years as Director of the Clinical Research Unit Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam. His clinical and scientific interests have been in integrated health sciences across a range of public health priorities including emerging infections, influenza, infections of the brain, HIV, dengue, typhoid, malaria, tuberculosis, snakebite, and antimicrobial resistance.
Dr Farrar trained in neurology and infectious diseases in London, Edinburgh, Melbourne and Oxford. He has a PhD in immunology from the University of Oxford.
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Like so many breakthroughs, it happened almost by accident. In the late 1940s, fishermen near Lederle Laboratories, in New York state, noticed that the trout they were catching were getti...
