I am a historian medicine specialising in modern and contemporary history, politics and political economy of international health. My research focuses on infectious disease, accessing of essential medicine, and emerging powers in global health. My work has been sponsored by multiple grants from the Wellcome Trust, the Brocher Foundation, and the Consortium of History of Science, Technology and Medicine.
I am a research associate at Humanitarian and Crisis Response Institute (HCRI) at the University of Manchester, currently working for the Wellcome Trust-funded project "Developing Humanitarian Medicine: from Alma-Ata to Bio-tech, a History of Norms, Knowledge Production and Care (1978-2020)”. As part of the project, I examinie the recognition of artemisinin as standard clinical treatment for malaria and the prequalification and procurement of artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs). The research studies how life-saving treatments, particularly, indigenous knowledge, move from discovery to becoming standard care in medical humanitarian aids, including the complex regulatory, quality assurance, and procurement challenges that determine access to essential medicines.
Before joining the HCRI, I was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health (WCCEH) and Department History at the University of Exeter, working on the Wellcome Trust funded project Connecting Three Worlds: Socialism, Medicine and Global Health After World War II (C3W) led by Dora Vargha, Sarah Marks, and Edna Suarez-Diaz. As part of the C3W project, I am currently working on “Solidarity Medicine: Socialism and Local Roots of Primary Health Care in China, India, and Tanzania. It studies how socialism, with its diverse interpretations and applications, has shaped the early practices of Primary Health Care in China, India and Tanzania, which ultimately influenced the global health agenda setting. Departing from the narrative of how the ideas from the developed North influenced the less developed South, this project takes China, India, and Tanzania as sites for different ideas to display, debate, and develop under their certain social, political, economic, historical, and cultural contexts.
I obtained my Ph.D in 2022 from the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre in Global Health Histories at the University of York, which has moved to the University of Leeds. My Ph.D received doctoral fellowship from the Wellcome Trust.
My first monograph, From Absence to Influence: the WHO and China in Global Health (forthcoming), presents a historical analysis of the evolving relationship between China and the WHO, from its disconnection and absence to the reconciliation, resistance, and selective engagement in the latter half of the twentieth century.
