Vanessa Kerry

Vanessa Kerry, a physician, is the director of the Program in Global Public Policy and Social Change in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. The program examines the essential power of health to address economic, social, and cultural disparities that define poor health domestically and internationally. The Program’s signature initiative is the Threatened Health System Initiative which specifically focuses on the opportunities for protecting health systems in crisis response especially by security and military actors. The Initiative’s goal is to strengthen policies around crisis response, to develop networks between security actors, health providers, NGOs and others to improve problem-solving, to engage in research to better understand the health systems’ vulnerability and the subsequent opportunities for improved response, and to provide technical support to build capacity in these systems. Dr. Kerry is the founder and CEO of Seed Global Health, a non-profit that strengthens health systems by investing in health professionals in resource-limited settings and ensures the resilience of those systems to address the many health burdens they face today and might tomorrow. She is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Medical School where she is faculty at both. She earned her Masters's in joint degrees from the London Schools of Economics and Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader.