Abha Saxena
Dr. Abha Saxena is an independent bioethics advisor for the past seven years, with a special interest in training and research in global bioethics. Her areas of interest are in the ethics of infectious disease outbreaks, health systems research, healthy ageing, adolescent health care, human challenge studies, data collection, mining and sharing and new technologies including genetically modified organisms. She has also supported the development of norms and standards for research ethics committees and is keen to support quality evaluation of such committees. She is currently the ethics advisor to three international research projects, and on the ethics committee of one international research consortia. She is currently providing consulting services to the Indian Council for Medical Research. In the past she has advised WHO, Medicines for Malaria Venture, FIND– an international NGO, the INCLEN Trust, the Aga Khan University Ethics Review Board amongst others. She is also a member of an Independent Resource Group for Global Health Justice, which supports public deliberations on global health justice issues.
Dr. Abha Saxena transitioned from the World Health Organization (WHO, Geneva) in May 2018, where she had worked for more than seventeen years in global health and research ethics, and provided leadership to the global health ethics team, and the WHO’s research ethics committee, working at the cutting edge of public health, policy, research and ethics.
Currently based in Geneva, by training she is an anesthesiologist and pain and palliative care expert.
Dr. Abha Saxena joins The International Risk Podcast for a timely conversation on the geopolitics of global health. From vaccine diplomacy and pandemic treaties to data sovereignty and the influence of private tech firms, she and Dominic Bowen explore how global health has become deeply entangled with national security, ethics, and international power dynamics.
Click the button below to listen to the full episode. If you’d like to learn more about the geopolitics of global health and emerging international risks, be sure to read our latest feature on the topic!
