Tamer H. Farag Email and Phone Number

My team leverages Gavi's innovative and flexible business models to work with commercial partners, philanthropies and other private sector entities to drive impact in the vaccine space, with a focus on vaccine delivery at scale. When we interact with the world, we bring experience gained vaccinating over 1.1 billion children, together with our government partners. To Gavi, we bring innovation and expertise from the private sector that has led to new methods and technologies being employed in the fight against infectious diseases. Reach out to innovate with us.

I run a consulting and strategic advisory business working with governments, big technology companies, AI startups, pharmaceutical companies, and development partners. Primary areas of work include: behavioral health, infectious disease epidemiology, measurement for strategic investing, and market strategy. High impact projects include 1) designing a strategy to leverage national biotech policy for dual impact on global health and national industrial growth with a high-level government client; 2) enhancing clinical trial enrollment using AI-informed behavioral interventions with a pharmaceutical company; and 3) advising a major health technology company on market strategy for a pandemic response product.

I led the Surveillance and Delivery function for the Local Burden of Disease (LBD) initiative, which creates 5x5 km geospatial maps of disease, mortality, and other indicators. LBD maps include under-five mortality, diarrheal disease and lower respiratory infection. Maps for other diseases and indicators are in production. I worked with government officials, policymakers and funders to design public health system solutions based around strategic use of LBD maps to better deploy investments against burden of disease, leading to greater impact. When closely coordinated with country surveillance and delivery operations, LBD can serve as the basis for comprehensive precision public health solutions.I previously served as the liaison with the Gates Foundation, WHO, GAVI and other critical partner organizations.

I advised the Minister of Health on fundraising and development of a new strategy to achieve universal healthcare coverage in Mali. As part of this work, I connected the Minister and colleagues with development banks and other funders, wrote funding applications, drafted strategy documents and coordinated the development of a Bamako-based internal strategy team.

I developed a suite of mortality surveillance grants, including the Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance (CHAMPS) network, a new primary data collection network to track the causes of child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, and the Countrywide Mortality Surveillance for Action (COMSA) initiative, a sample registration system (SRS) based approach to collect mortality data across the map. I also developed the PathAI grant, a project to use machine learning to classify pathology images, a project we hope will remove a bottleneck in the cause of death determination process. I also developed investment strategies around aligning, analyzing, modeling, forecasting and visualizing mortality and infectious disease surveillance data so that it can be used for decision-making from the district to regional and global levels. Technologies developed included data ontologies, machine learning, and model-based geostatistics.

As Coordinating Clinical Epidemiologist of the Global Enteric Multicenter Study (GEMS), the largest infectious disease case-control study ever conducted, I coordinated the activities of over 300 US and local site scientists, physicians, microbiologists, field workers and administrators, including at US federal and international agencies. I also conducted data analysis on GEMS data and developed new analytical techniques to address the needs of this unique study. Besides classical epidemiologic techniques, I developed time series models to explore the contribution of sociodemographic, climatic and economic exposures to pathogen-specific disease incidence.I was also proud to be involved in the Enterics Research Investigational Network (ERIN) study to determine bacterial genetic correlates of lethality in enteropathogenic E.coli (EPEC) and Shigella strains.

Worked closely with the World Bank Booster Program for Malaria Control in Africa to design an integrated schistosomiasis/malaria control program to mitigate the impact of a major development initiative for the Senegal River Basin.

Implemented a cluster-randomized clinical trial of treatments to prevent and treat severe anemia of pregnancy on Pemba Island, Zanzibar, Tanzania.

Molecular microbiology, antibiotic sensitivity testing and vaccine trial support, primarily involving diarrheal pathogens Enterotoxigenic E.Coli (ETEC) and Shigella.