Madhukar Pai (also known as Madhu Pai) is an Indian medical doctor, academic, advocate, writer, and university professor. Pai's work is around global health, specifically advocacy for better treatment for tuberculosis with a focus on South Africa and India. Pai is the inaugural Chair of the Department of Global and Public Health in the School of Population and Global Health and holds a

Canada Research Chair Canada Research Chair (CRC) is a title given to certain Canadian university research professors by the Canada Research Chairs Program. Program goals The Canada Research Chair program was established in 2000 as a part of the Government of Canada ...

in Epidemiology and Global Health at McGill University.

Education

Pai completed medical training and his community medicine

residency Residency may refer to: * Domicile (law), the act of establishing or maintaining a residence in a given place ** Permanent residency, indefinite residence within a country despite not having citizenship * Residency (medicine), a stage of postgrad ...

at the

Christian Medical College Christian Medical College, Vellore, widely known as CMC, Vellore, is a private, Christian community-run medical school, hospital and research institute. This Institute includes a network of primary, secondary and tertiary care hospitals in a ...

Vellore, India. He received his Ph.D in epidemiology from University of California, Berkeley. He also did a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California San Francisco.

Committees and editorial boards

Pai serves on the Scientific Advisory Committee of FIND (the global alliance for diagnostics) and is on the World Health Organization's Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on In Vitro Diagnostics and the Access Advisory Committee of TB Alliance. He is the Chair of the Public-Private Mix Working Group of the

Stop TB Partnership The Stop TB Partnership was established in 2001 to eliminate tuberculosis as a public health problem. Its 1500 partner organizations include international, nongovernmental and governmental organizations and patient groups. The secretariat is based ...

. Pai is also on the editorial boards of

BMJ ''The BMJ'' is a weekly peer-reviewed medical trade journal, published by the trade union the British Medical Association (BMA). ''The BMJ'' has editorial freedom from the BMA. It is one of the world's oldest general medical journals. Origina ...

Global Health,

PLoS Medicine ''PLOS Medicine'' (formerly styled ''PLoS Medicine'') is a peer-reviewed weekly medical journal covering the full spectrum of the medical sciences. It began operation on October 19, 2004, as the second journal of the Public Library of Science (PLO ...

, Lancet Infectious Diseases, and is an Editor-in-Chief of PLOS Global Public Health.

Advocacy

Pai is a frequent media commentator on the COVID-19 pandemic in India, and in 2021 drew comparisons of the collective global action taken in response to the

COVID19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identified ...

versus the relative inaction towards tuberculosis. His 2021 paper in

PLOS Medicine ''PLOS Medicine'' (formerly styled ''PLoS Medicine'') is a peer-reviewed weekly medical journal covering the full spectrum of the medical sciences. It began operation on October 19, 2004, as the second journal of the Public Library of Science (PLO ...

addressed power asymmetries in global health. In 2020 and in 2021 he published papers and contributions about the decolonisation of global health work. In 2021, Pai was critical of the global failure to widely vaccinate people against COVID-19, accused high-income nations of vaccine hoarding, and called for a waiver of intellectual property laws regarding COVID19 vaccines. In 2022 he described the global response to COVID-19 as an "unmitigated disaster".

Awards

* Chanchlani Global Health Research Award 2012 * Union Scientific Prize * Haile T. Debas Prize * David Johnston Faculty & Staff Award

Selected publications

* * *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pai, Madhukar Indian epidemiologists Global health Canadian epidemiologists Tuberculosis researchers Health equity Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Decolonization University of California, Berkeley alumni University of California, San Francisco alumni PLOS people Royal Society of Canada Fellows of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences People from Vellore