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Edinburgh Infectious Diseases Winter Lecture 2021

Science, Innovation and Society - Pandemic Preparedness

This year we were delighted to have Sir Jeremy Farrar, Director of the Wellcome Trust, giving our annual public Winter Lecture.

From his perspective as Director of one of the world's most influential medical research charities, Jeremy spoke about what we need to learn from the current pandemic and the priorities he sees for a post-pandemic society.

Click here to listen to Sir Jeremy's lecture

About Jeremy

Jeremy’s whole career has been dedicated to protecting and improving global health. As a researcher he specialised in infectious diseases, and he has published more than 600 papers.

Born in Singapore, Jeremy lived there and in Cyprus, New Zealand and Libya as a child before moving to the UK as a teenager. He holds degrees in immunology and medicine from University College London and a doctorate in neuroimmunology from the University of Oxford. He trained as a doctor in London, Edinburgh, Melbourne, San Francisco and Oxford.

Jeremy spent 18 years leading the Clinical Research Unit at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, where he made many pivotal advances in the understanding of diseases like tuberculosis (TB), malaria, typhoid, dengue and influenza, as well as helping to train scientists from across South-east Asia and beyond. He joined Wellcome as Director in 2013.

As part of the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Jeremy is a member of the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), the UK Vaccine Taskforce and the Principles Group of the ACT-Accelerator hosted by the World Health Organization (WHO), and he chairs the WHO R&D Blueprint Advisory Group.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the European Molecular Biology Organization, the US National Academies and the UK Academy of Medical Sciences. In 2018 he received the President Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Humanitarian of the Year Award and in 2019 was knighted for services to global health.