Jeremy Farrar

Sir Jeremy James Farrar (born 1 September 1961) is a British medical researcher who has served as Chief Scientist at the World Health Organization since 2023. He was previously the director of The Wellcome Trust from 2013 to 2023 and a professor of tropical medicine at the University of Oxford.

Born in Singapore, Farrar is the youngest of six children in his family. His father taught English and his mother was a writer and artist. Due to his father's work, he spent his childhood in New Zealand, Cyprus and Libya.

Farrar was educated at Churcher's College and UCL Medical School, from where he obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in immunology in 1983 and a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery degree in 1986. Farrar completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Oxford in 1998 on myasthenia gravis.

Farrar's research interests are in infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, dengue fever, typhoid fever, malaria, and H5N1 influenza.

From 1996 until 2013, Farrar was Director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ho Chi Minh City. In 2004, he and his Vietnamese colleague Tran Tinh Hien identified the re-emergence of the deadly bird flu, or H5N1, in humans. He was Professor of Tropical Medicine and Global Health at the University of Oxford from 2000 until 2013.

In addition to his academic work, Farrar was part of the Center for Global Development’s Working Group on Priority-Setting Institutions for Global Health in 2012.

In 2013, Farrar was appointed Director of the Wellcome Trust. During his time at the Wellcome Trust, with Chris Whitty and Neil Ferguson, he co-authored an article in Nature titled "Infectious disease: Tough choices to reduce Ebola transmission", explaining the UK government's response to Ebola in Sierra Leone, including the proposal to build and support centres where people could self-isolate voluntarily if they suspected that they could have the disease. In July 2015, he co-authored a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine (with Adel Mahmoud and Stanley A. Plotkin), titled "Establishing a Global Vaccine-Development Fund", that led to the founding in 2017 of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). Together with a number of others, in 2016 he proposed a World Serum Bank as a means of helping combat epidemics.

In addition to his role at the Wellcome Trust, Farrar has served as chair on several advisory boards for governments and global organizations. In 2017, he was part of the selection committee chaired by Jules A. Hoffmann that chose Stewart Cole as director of the Institut Pasteur. From 2017 until 2019, he was a member of the German Ministry of Health’s International Advisory Board on Global Health, chaired by Ilona Kickbusch. In 2019 he served on The Lancet Commission on Tuberculosis, co-chaired by Eric Goosby, Dean Jamison and Soumya Swaminathan. He is also a member of the Health and Biomedical Sciences International Advisory Council (HBMS IAC) at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research of Singapore.