Vanessa Kerry

Dr Kerry is a critical care physician at Massachusetts General Hospital in the US and she spearheads the program in Global Public Policy and Social Change in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She is also co-founder and the CEO of Seed Global Health, an organisation that brings together medical and nursing volunteers with their peers in resource-limited settings.

Dr Kerry has witnessed health inequities around many places in the world and how shortages of local health providers in their home countries contribute to those inequities. She envisions a solution where the growing number of US health professionals interested in global health serve as educators and faculty in these countries to build a pipeline of future in‐country providers.

Her work in global health has also included policy initiatives in Rwanda as well as looking at novel ways for US foreign assistance can help fund health efforts to improve efficiency of aid delivery, develop capacity, and enhance country ownership.

Prominent publications include “An International Service Corps for Health: A New Prescription for Diplomacy” in the New England Journal of Medicine, “…One for Doctors Too,” a New York Times opinion piece published in 2010 and most recently, "Global Health Service Partnership: building health professional leadership as a roadmap to sustainable health systems" in The Lancet.

She graduated from Yale University summa cum laude and Harvard Medical School cum laude, completing her Internal Medicine residency and Critical Care fellowship 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.