Joia S. Mukherjee, MD, MPH

Dr. Mukherjee’s scholarly work focuses on the provision of health as a human right and on the design, implementation, and evaluation of comprehensive health care in resource-poor settings. More specifically, Dr. Mukherjee’s work integrates the principles and practice of social medicine—proximity, reducing barriers through analysis and accompaniment, as well as deployment of history and social theories to understand and remediate health inequities. Dr. Mukherjee’s scholarship highlights the clinical innovation needed to build health systems capable of providing complex care in challenging environments. In 2001, Dr. Mukherjee and her team published a paper in the Lancet describing the first HIV treatment program in Haiti. Based on this work, Dr. Mukherjee was invited to be part of the WHO’s Strategic and Technical Working Group on HIV/AIDS and helped write the first international guidelines on the use of antiretroviral therapy. Similarly, Dr. Mukherjee’s work to demonstrate the feasibility and the scale-up of treatment for drug-resistant tuberculosis (DRTB) in Peru and Russia led to international changes. Dr. Mukherjee was asked to help write the national guidelines (in both countries) and to work with a small team at the WHO to write the first set of international guidelines on the treatment of DRTB. Dr. Mukherjee has authored journal articles, led protocol development, and written book chapters that are foundational in the field Global Health, particularly in the social medicine approach; including first-authored scholarship in the areas of HIV and MDR-TB and in senior authored work in the areas of mental health, Ebola, and maternal-child health. In the last two years, Dr. Mukherjee’s work has been focused on synthesizing these lessons to form a framework for the achievement of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) which is the critical component of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal for health. In all, Dr. Mukherjee’s work is deeply rooted in social medicine—understanding the structural barriers to care and developing innovative solutions to address them.  Infectious disease, since the time of Virchow has a clear link between the social and the biological. Dr. Mukherjee describes herself as a full time scholar and her work over the last twenty years as teacher, researcher and innovator hinges on a bio-social analysis.