Professor Jha studied Medicine at the University of Manitoba and was awarded a DPhil in Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Oxford, where he was supervised by the late Professor Dame Valerie Beral and Professor Sir Richard Peto. He is currently the University Professor of Global Health and Epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and Temerity School of Medicine, University of Toronto, and Director of the Centre for Global Health Research, Unity Health Toronto. He has served on a number of advisory boards and has been a health adviser to several governments.
Professor Jha said ‘It is a unique privilege to succeed Professor Sir Rory Collins as Head of Department. The department is internationally renowned for providing definitive evidence on some of the most important health-related questions, and for pioneering new methods that have changed the way population research is undertaken. I look forward to working with the department’s multidisciplinary teams to continue to improve the health of millions of people and prevent avoidable suffering around the world.’
Professor Jha’s research focuses on large-scale epidemiological studies of the major causes of death in developing countries (including tobacco, alcohol, cardiometabolic risk factors, and air pollution), and epidemiological research methods in low-resource settings, including randomised intervention studies. He is also particularly interested in the use of routine mortality data for analytic epidemiology, and tobacco control policy in developed and developing countries. His research enabled a worldwide treaty on tobacco control signed now by 180 countries. He has quantified malaria mortality in children and adults in various settings, leading to vaccine trials.
Read the full story on the Nuffield Department of Population Health website.