Dr. Sumegha Asthana is a Postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Global Health Science and Security & Adjunct faculty, Department of Health Management and Policy, School of Health.
She is a physician, health administrator, and a health policy and systems researcher. She works at the intersections of global health governance, influence of development aid on national health policies, gender, and mainstreaming of alternative systems of medicine in public health.
Her public health journey started 12 years ago in India with a masters in health administration from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She then worked with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) in India as a national consultant. Next, she completed doctoral research in social medicine focusing on the role of global actors in health systems strengthening at Jawaharlal Nehru University in India. Sumegha is a Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellow (SYLFF) and a DAAD scholar. She is an advocate for decolonizing global health and building Health policy and system research capacities in LMICs. For the last five years, she has worked as an independent public health consultant with multiple international and national health care organizations. She is an honorary lecturer at Queen Mary University London, where she taught global health policy and governance, and an adjunct faculty at The Institute of Public Health in Bengaluru, where she teaches for the India HPSR Fellowship programme. She was also a consultant with the WHO Country office for India where she worked on compiling good practices for continuing essential Sexual and Reproductive health services during COVID.
Sumegha is the co-founder, in addition to the first chair, of the India chapter of a global social movement called Women in Global Health. The movement aims to achieve gender equality in global health leadership. She was also recently named in Apolitical’s 100 Most Influential Academics in Government list in 2021.
