Jesse B Bump
Lecturer on Global Health Policy
Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Departments
Department of Global Health and Population
Other Positions
Executive Director, Takemi Program
Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Biography
Jesse B. Bump studies how societies decide who gets what in health: the ideas, institutions, and political processes that determine what gets funded, what gets covered, and who is left out.
He is Executive Director of the Takemi Program in International Health and Lecturer on Global Health Policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and a Member of the Bergen Center for Ethics and Priority Setting at the University of Bergen.
His work combines historical scholarship with political economy. Trained as a historian of science and medicine, Bump examines how decision-making institutions form, why they produce the outcomes they do, and what that implies for reform. The through-line across twenty years is that access failures are rarely technical. They are the residue of arrangements built without explicit design and lacking accountability.
That approach has been applied to health technology assessment, priority setting, benefit package design, and health financing. With colleagues, Bump developed political economy frameworks for analyzing health financing reform and for understanding when governments support common goods for health, commissioned by the World Health Organization and applied by national reform teams. Related work has examined resource allocation at multilateral institutions, the evaluation of evidence in priority setting, and the governance of nutrition and non-communicable disease policy. He has advised the Minister of Health of Nigeria on international partnerships, worked with HITAP in Thailand on priority-setting for non-communicable diseases, and published health system and regulatory analyses on Tanzania, Zambia, Pakistan, Turkey, and Greece.
His earliest work was on the African river-blindness campaign, among the largest pharmaceutical donation partnerships ever attempted, which he helped run, then evaluated, then modeled for sustainability. It shaped a lasting interest in why some access programs endure and others do not.
Bump has also written extensively on equity, legitimacy, and the colonial inheritance of global health institutions. This work is a demand for fairness, questioning who holds authority in this field and on what basis.
Alongside research he convenes. The Takemi Program brings mid-career Fellows to Harvard each year; he serves on the Scientific and International Organizing Committees of the Prince Mahidol Award Conference, on the board of Aidspan, the independent monitor of the Global Fund, and on the editorial board of Health Systems & Reform. He teaches the political economy of global health and a course on decolonizing global health, and has received awards for mentoring and for teaching.
His current work concerns pharmaceutical innovation and access: how federal policy shapes innovation capacity, and why patients with valid prescriptions for life-saving medicines cannot obtain them during patent exclusivity.
Bump has published more than seventy peer-reviewed articles, including in The Lancet, The BMJ, BMJ Global Health, and Health Policy and Planning. He holds a PhD from Johns Hopkins, an MPH from Harvard, and an AB from Amherst, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.