Dr Anita Zaidi, [MBBS, ’88] currently director, Vaccine Development & Surveillance (VD&S) and Enteric & Diarrheal Diseases (EDD) has been named by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as the first president of Gender Equality.
In this new role, Dr Zaidi will oversee a division comprised of the foundation’s Gender Equality program team and Gender Program Advocacy and Communications team. She will also take on responsibility for the foundation’s broader gender integration agenda, working with and across all program teams to ensure gender is being incorporated in a smart, thoughtful way to increase impact.
She will be joining six other foundation presidents as part of the Executive Leadership Team (ELT) and will assume her new role effective November 2, 2020.
Dr Zaidi is a pediatric infectious diseases physician who joined the foundation in 2014 as director of the Enteric and Diarrheal Diseases team. As department chair of Pediatrics and Child Health at the Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan, she worked to reduce child mortality through the prevention and treatment of illness. She was awarded the Caplow’s Children’s Prize for her pioneering work bringing health services and wraparound care to mothers and children in poverty-stricken communities in Karachi. At the foundation, she continued her innovative work on behalf of vulnerable women and children by helping to establish the Maternal Newborn Child Health Discovery & Tools program in 2017. She also took on directorship of the foundation’s Vaccine Development and Surveillance team in 2017 and created a Women Leaders in Global Health program, now called WomenLift Health, to promote diversity in global health leadership.
Dr Zaidi is a graduate of the class of 1988 of the Aga Khan University and completed her training at Duke, Boston’s Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and the Harvard School of Public Health. She has published more than 200 research papers focused on vaccine-preventable diseases, and newborn infections in resource-limited settings.
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Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Appoints President of Gender Equality