Madhukar Pai | |
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Born | Vellore, India |
Alma mater | |
Known for | Tuberculosis and public health research, equity advocacy |
Awards |
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Madhukar Pai (also known as Madhu Pai) is an Indian medical doctor, academic, advocate,[1] writer,[2] and university professor. Pai's work is around global health, specifically advocacy for better treatment for tuberculosis[3] with a focus on South Africa and India.[4][5] Pai is the Canada Research Chair of Epidemiology and Global Health at McGill University.[4]
Pai completed medical training and his community medicine residency at the Christian Medical College[6] Vellore, India.[4] He received his Ph.D in epidemiology from University of California, Berkeley.[4] He also did a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California San Francisco.[4]
Pai serves on the Scientific Advisory Committee of FIND (the global alliance for diagnostics)[4] and is on the World Health Organization's Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on In Vitro Diagnostics and the Access Advisory Committee of TB Alliance.[4] He is the Chair of the Public-Private Mix Working Group of the Stop TB Partnership.[4] Pai is also on the editorial boards of BMJ Global Health, PLoS Medicine, Lancet Infectious Diseases,[4] and is an Editor-in-Chief of PLOS Global Public Health.[7]
Pai is a frequent media commentator on the COVID-19 pandemic in India,[8][2][9] and in 2021 drew comparisons of the collective global action taken in response to the COVID19 pandemic versus the relative inaction towards tuberculosis.[10] His 2021 paper in PLOS Medicine addressed power asymmetries in global health.[11]
In 2020[12] and in 2021[13] he published papers and contributions about the decolonisation of global health work.
In 2021, Pai was critical of the global failure to widely vaccinate people against COVID-19, accused high-income nations of vaccine hoarding, and called for a waiver of intellectual property laws regarding COVID19 vaccines.[14] In 2022 he described the global response to COVID-19 as an "unmitigated disaster".[15]