I am an academic researcher working at the intersection of history, politics, and the political economy of international and global health. My work engages with questions of health sovereignty, access to medicines, alternative pharmaceutical R&D and production, product development partnerships, and the dynamics of South-South collaboration.
I am currently based at the Humanitarian and Crisis Response Institute (HCRI) at the University of Manchester, contributing to the Wellcome Trust-funded project Developing Humanitarian Medicine: from Alma-Ata to Bio-tech, a History of Norms, Knowledge Production and Care (1978-2020). I am also a member of the PharmaGHaSTS Research Network: Critical Social Science of Pharmaceuticals at the Intersection of Global Health and Science, Technology, and Society, co-sponsored by Université Paris-Cité and King’s College London.
My research examines the global access to medicines movement from the 1980s to the present, tracing how civil society mobilisation, international trade law, and humanitarian advocacy have shaped the politics of pharmaceutical access. A central focus of this work is the emergence of alternative drug development models that fundamentally challenge the market-driven logic of the pharmaceutical industry — models that seek to decouple the cost of research and development from the price of medicines, and to reorient innovation towards diseases that disproportionately affect low- and middle-income countries but offer little commercial return. This includes a particular focus on the including the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Campagne pour l'Accès aux Médicaments Essentiels (CAME) and its role in contesting intellectual property regimes, and on the rise of product development partnerships (PDPs), including the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi) and the Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership (GARDP), as not-for-profit, needs-driven alternatives to conventional pharmaceutical research, and their broader implications for global health governance and innovation policy.
In addition, as a supporter of the World Health Organization (WHO)’ s Emergency Medical Teams (EMTs), I am centrally involved in researching the local origins and development of emergency medical teams in the Asia-Pacific region and Africa, examining how communities, health systems, and regional actors have built local capacity for emergency medical response, and how these grassroots and regional efforts have informed and shaped the broader global EMTs framework.
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 completed my Ph.D at the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre in Global Health Histories at the University of York in 2022, funded by a Wellcome Trust Doctoral Fellowship.
My first monograph Health Sovereignty: China, WHO and Reconfiguration of Global Health Partnerships examines health sovereignty through a multi-dimensional framework encompassing juridical recognition, political and financial autonomy, epistemic independence, and material self-sufficiency. Drawing on China’s experience of exclusion from and reintegration into global health governance from 1949 to the 1980s, the book traces how socialist health innovation and indigenous capacity building, including primary healthcare delivery, knowledge production, and pharmaceutical research, development, and manufacturing, forged the foundations of genuine health sovereignty, enabling China to leverage its capacities to engage global health governance on its own terms. It offers a historically grounded framework for rethinking sovereignty and equitable global health partnerships under contemporary conditions of geopolitical fragmentation and renewed contestation of the international health order.
