Vanessa Bradford Kerry
Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Health
Environmental Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Departments
Department of Environmental Health
Other Positions
Associate Professor of Medicine
Medicine-Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School
Related Links
Biography
Vanessa Kerry, MD, MSc, is a critical care trained physician who is the co-founder and CEO of Seed Global Health (Seed), a non-profit that focuses on the power of investing in health and the health workforce for social well-being, economic growth, equity which transforms countries. At Harvard, she serves as the director of the program in Global Health and Climate Policy in the Department of Environmental Health and a core faculty member at the Center for Climate, Health and Global Environment (C-CHANGE) at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Director of the Program in Global Public Policy at Mass General, a Harvard Medical School affiliated hospital. She also serves as the World Health Organization's Special Envoy for Climate Change and Health. Dr. Kerry’s academic focus is on health system strengthening with a focus on health workforce, climate change and health and global health security.
Prominent publications include in the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, PloS Medicine, Academic Medicine, BMJ and Global Heart. She has commented in media on the importance of health including for BBC, NPR, MSNBC, CNN and other venues and has presented at major convenings including the World Health Assembly, the United Nations, Tedx Boston, Aspen Ideas Festival, the Brookings Institute and other public forums.
Under her leadership at Seed and through partnership with governments and in-country academic institutions, Seed has helped train over 47,000 doctors, nurses and midwives and has impacted hundreds of thousands of lives. Seed's impact is rooted in its unique leveraging model that not only provides better care to patients, but also trains future generations, supports the health sector and catalyzes change in the health system.
At Seed, Dr. Kerry helped establish the Global Health Service Partnership (GHSP), a first ever public-private partnership with the Peace Corps, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the countries where the program works. GHSP supported health systems in five sub-Saharan African countries. Dr. Kerry’s work stems from her professional interests in capacity-building to strengthen public sector health systems and communities in resource poor settings. She believes deeply that health is fundamental to economic, social wellbeing and national security. Her work has included innovative research in the nexus of national security, crisis response and health including a two-year project with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. She has taught courses on the intersection of health, economy, politics and security at the Kennedy School of Government and Yale University.
Dr. Kerry has spoken at a number of venues on her work including the United Nations, the World Health Assembly, the World Economic Forum, the Aspen Ideas Festival, Consortium of Universities for Global Health, the Women Leaders in Global Health conferences, Devex, the Brookings Institute, Council on Foreign Relations and other public fora. Her work has been featured by NPR, PBS, MSNBC’s Morning Joe and Andrea Mitchell, Boston’s Chronicle, Boston Magazine and Marie Claire Magazine among others. Prominent publications on her work include in the New England Journal of Medicine, BMJ, the New York Times and The Lancet. She is a Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation Social Entrepreneur, a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Public Policy from Northeastern University in 2015. She is on the Editorial Board of New England Journal of Medicine Evidence and Annals of Global Health. She was recently appointed to the President’s Council for International Activities and the Board of the Jackson School of International Affairs at Yale University, as a Global Advisor to the Wellbeing Foundation Africa and on the Board at University of Global Health Equity. She serves as the Climate Change and Global Health expert for the External Research Council of the National Intelligence Council for the U.S. Government.
She graduated from Yale University summa cum laude and Harvard Medical School cum laude, completing her clinical training at Massachusetts General Hospital. She earned her Master’s in Health Policy, Planning, and Financing from the London Schools of Economics and of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Education and Training
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B.S., Molecular Cellular and Developmental Biology
Yale University -
M.D., Medicine
Harvard Medical School -
M.Sc. (joint), Health Policy, Planning and Financing
London School of Economics -
M.Sc. (joint), Health Policy, Planning and Financing
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine