Kate O'Brien | Director, Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals
World Health Organisation (WHO)

Dr. Kate O’Brien is the Director of the Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals (IVB) Department at the World Health Organization (WHO). In this role she is responsible for leading WHO’s vaccine and immunization strategy and implementation to advance the vision of a world where everyone, everywhere, at every age, fully benefits from vaccines for good health and wellbeing.  The Department works across all levels of WHO (countries, regions, and headquarters), in collaboration with partners, to support countries achieve the optimum use and impact of vaccines across the life-course from infancy to older adult years, in routine programmes, as well as outbreak, emergency and pandemic responses.  Dr. O’Brien served as WHO’s technical lead on COVID vaccine during the pandemic response, through the vaccine pillar (i.e., COVAX) of the global multi-partner pandemic collaboration, ACT-A (Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator). WHO's IVB Department works end-to-end across the vaccine preventable disease (VPD) value chain to achieve life-saving impact.  The Department is responsible for convening and coordinating key global vaccine agendas, VPD control/elimination strategies, and partnerships, as well as developing and issuing global vaccine and immunization policy recommendations, global immunization coverage monitoring, vaccine impact modeling, vaccine preventable disease surveillance, and advancing global vaccine access. IVB also has responsibilities for accelerating the vaccine research and development agenda on priority pathogens, optimizing immunization data systems and monitoring, enhancing immunization programme and campaign effectiveness, along with guiding vaccine introductions, vaccine portfolio prioritization and optimization, and outbreak responses.    Dr O’Brien is a pediatrician, infectious disease specialist, epidemiologist, and vaccine clinical trialist. She earned a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from University of Toronto (Canada), her MDCM from McGill University (Canada), and her MPH from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (USA). Her clinical training in pediatrics and infectious disease was at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions (USA) after which she served at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as an Epidemic Intelligence Officer and staff member.  She is a dual citizen of Canada and the USA. Prior to joining WHO in January 2019, she was Professor of International Health and Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where she served as the Director of Infectious Disease at the Center for American Indian Health, and Executive Director of the International Vaccine Access Center. She served as a member of WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization (SAGE) from 2012-2017.  Her research and policy work over the past 30 years has focused on vaccine impact and equity through disease and risk-factor epidemiology studies, clinical field trials of investigational new vaccines, etiology studies of pneumonia, vaccine impact and effectiveness evaluations, modeling of VPD disease burden, and policy analyses to drive evidence-based decision making.   She has led policy and strategy initiatives to accelerate life-saving vaccine introductions and scale up in low- and middle-income countries, working in south Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, and with American Indian tribes in the southwestern United States.