Salmaan Keshavjee

Salmaan Keshavjee, MD, PhD, ScM, is the Director of Harvard Medical School’s Center for Global Health Delivery—Dubai. He is also an Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine (DGHSM) at Harvard Medical School and a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Dr. Keshavjee has been leading the Harvard Medical School Center for Global Health Delivery—Dubai since 2014. Under his direction, the Center addresses some of the most pressing health challenges in the region by focusing on research, medical education and training that promises to improve healthcare delivery systems and patient outcomes for diseases prevalent in the United Arab Emirates, Middle East, North Africa and neighboring regions. The Center also provides opportunities for faculty and students to pursue research related to the delivery of existing or new interventions that can cure or prevent disease, specifically in the following priority areas: diabetes and obesity, infectious disease, mental health, and surgery.

With advanced training in both medicine and anthropology, Dr. Keshavjee is a leading expert in drug-resistant tuberculosis treatment and the anthropology of health policy. He is the author of Blind Spot: How neoliberalism infiltrated global health, which is based on is doctoral research in Central Asia (Tajikistan). He has worked extensively with the Boston-based non-profit Partners In Health (PIH) on the treatment of drug-resistant tuberculosis. Over the last 14 years has conducted clinical and implementation research in Russia (2000-present). He was also the Deputy-Director for the PIH Lesotho Initiative (2006-2008), launching one of the first community-based treatment programs for multi-drug resistant tuberculosis/HIV co-infection in sub-Saharan Africa. His research has resulted in a number of manuscripts of global clinical and policy significance.

Dr. Keshavjee has been very involved in global policy discussions around the treatment of drug- resistant tuberculosis. In 2005, he became a member of the World Health Organization/Stop TB Partnership’s Green Light Committee for MDR-TB Treatment. From 2007 to 2010, he was the committee’s chair. He has spent considerable time working on alternate mechanisms for drug procurement, technical assistance delivery, and program implementation. In addition to acting as a consultant to a number of projects globally, Dr. Keshavjee was the co-author of an Institute of Medicine white paper on overcoming barriers to expanding treatment for MDR-TB. Dr.

Keshavjee is leading an initiative at Harvard Medical School on how to achieve zero deaths from tuberculosis.

In addition to his research and policy work, Dr. Keshavjee is also an active member of the teaching faculty at Harvard. When on service as an attending physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Dr. Keshavjee teaches residents, interns, and medical students. He also co- teaches (along with Drs. Paul Farmer, Arthur Kleinman, and Anne Becker) a general education course for undergraduates at Harvard College, and is a guest lecturer on tuberculosis and health systems for a number of courses at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health.