Mr Monir Islam | Director, Family Health & Research, SEARO
WHO

Dr Quazi Monirul Islam, is the Director of the Department of Family Health and Research, World Health Organization, South East Asia Regional Office, New Delhi, India. Dr Islam is a public health specialist qualified from Dhaka University, Bangladesh and received MPH from Amsterdam University and the Royal Tropical Institute in the Netherlands. He was awarded FRCOG by the Royal College of Obstetric and Gynaecology, UK. He worked in a rural health complex in Bangladesh before going to Botswana in 1981. There he worked for ten years as a Medical Officer in District Hospitals; as Hospital Superintendent and as a Senior District Medical Officer responsible for all Primary Health Care programmes. He joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Netherlands as a Public Health Consultant advising the Ministry on their bilateral and multilateral contributions to health and population-related programmes and projects. In 1992 he was invited to join the Global Programme on AIDS in the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland and was responsible for Sexually Transmitted Diseases programme. and thereafter joined the Reproductive Health Programme as Chief of Population and Family Planning Unit and subsequently as Team Coordinator, Norms and Tools in the Reproductive Health and Research Department. In 2002, he was appointed as Director, Family and Community Health Department which included Reproductive Health and Research, Making Pregnancy Safer, Child and Adolescent Health, Nutrition, Nursing and Midwifery, Human Resources and Essential Drugs programme, in the WHO Regional Office for South-East Asia, New Delhi, India. Dr Islam took up his post as Director, Making Pregnancy Safer with global responsibility for maternal and newborn health, in Geneva in January 2005. Since August 2010, he was reassigned as Director of the department of Family Health and Research of WHO in the South-East Asia Region responsible for immunization and polio, reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health, nutrition and food safety, gender and women’s health, primary health care, nursing and midwifery, mental health, aging and all research work in the region.