Global Health Webinar: Supporting Sustainable Global Health

Dr. Richard Gordon, PhD, ACIM, is currently the Director of International Business Development at the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC). He is now heavily involved in building capacity in Africa as well as funder alignments through the innovative African Health Research and Innovation Funders Forum initiative. He was previously the Executive Director of the Grants, Innovation and Product Development groups at the SAMRC which oversaw the majority of the SAMRC’s international partnerships.

Richard has held a number of international and local representative positions which includes: The Ministerial Advisory Committee for Anti Microbial Resistance, The National Health Research Committee, Director of the Technology Innovation Agency API cluster program, South African representative on the EU led JPIAMR, leader on the WHO mRNA Lipid consortium as well as Chair of the PAVM talent development taskforce. Prior to joining the SAMRC Richard was head of Global Business Development for a UK based Contract research company called BioFocus.

Richard completed his PhD at the University of Cape Town and his post doctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge.

Karlee Silver is Chief Executive Officer for Grand Challenges Canada. She is a mission-driven leader committed to addressing inequity through innovation, powershifting and partnerships. Karlee is an active member of the Grand Challenge network and the International Development Innovation Alliance (IDIA). Until recently, Dr. Silver was Co-CEO with Jocelyn Mackie. Together, Jocelyn and Karlee secured ~$300M in funding to support innovations in low-and-middle-income countries and strengthened relationships with partners and funders, including Global Affairs Canada; enabled the incubation of Creating Hope in Conflict as a platform to deliver Humanitarian Grand Challenges and the Indigenous Innovation Initiative; launched the Being Initiative for youth mental health with a group of international funders and partners; incubated and invested in global health impact investment funds, and initiated new challenges on climate and health and sustainable diagnostic labs in low- and middle-income countries. Dr. Silver has been with Grand Challenges Canada since it launched, and led the process of selecting the organization’s prioritized grand challenges. Holding various roles, she set has strategy for global health, development and humanitarian innovation initiatives, and enabled the programs, investments and knowledge management teams to source, support and transition to scale promising innovations for social impact in low- and middle-income countries.

Prior to joining Grand Challenges Canada, Dr. Silver trained in the laboratory of Dr. Kevin Kain at the Sandra Rotman Centre in Toronto where she helped to identify host responses of malaria infection in pregnant women to harness for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. Dr. Silver received her doctorate from the University of Oxford, where she attended as a Rhodes Scholar and trained in genetics and immunology. An accumulation of inspirations, including traveling through southern Africa after Oxford, led to a refocus towards global health. Witnessing both the strength of women to sustain their families and communities, and the vulnerability of these same women to the consequences of poverty inspired Dr. Silver to apply herself to empowering women and girls.

Ramanan Laxminarayan is the founder and president of the One Health Trust, founded as the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy (CDDEP). He is a senior research scholar at Princeton University. He is an affiliate professor at the University of Washington, senior associate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a visiting professor at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. Dr. Laxminarayan chairs the board of GARD-P, a global product development partnership created by the World Health Organization, that aims to develop and deliver new treatments for bacterial infections. He is founder and board chair at HealthCubed, which works to improve access to healthcare and diagnostics worldwide.

Since 1995, Dr. Laxminarayan has worked to improve the understanding of antibiotic resistance as a problem of managing a shared global resource. His work encompasses extensive peer-reviewed research, public outreach, and direct engagement across Asia and Africa through the Global Antibiotic Resistance Partnership. Through his prolific research, active public outreach (including a TED talk that has been viewed over a million times), and sustained policy engagement, he has played a central role in bringing the issue of drug resistance to the attention of leaders and policymakers worldwide and to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2016.