Prabhat Jha
Head of Department; Nuffield Professor of Population Health
Professor Jha studied Medicine at the University of Manitoba and was awarded a DPhil in Epidemiology and Public Health (as a Rhodes Scholar) in the Cancer Epidemiology Unit where he was supervised by the late Professor Dame Valerie Beral.
He was the University Professor of Global Health and Epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and Temerty School of Medicine, University of Toronto, and Director of the Centre for Global Health Research. He has served on a number of advisory boards and has been a health adviser to several governments.
Prabhat’s research focuses on nationwide epidemiological studies of the major causes of death in developing countries (including tobacco, alcohol, and cardiometabolic risk factors), and epidemiological research methods in low-resource settings, including randomised intervention studies. He is particularly interested in the use of routine mortality data for analytic epidemiology, and tobacco control policy in developed and developing countries. His research enabled a worldwide treaty on tobacco control signed now by over 180 countries. He has quantified malaria mortality in children and adults in various settings, leading to vaccine trials.
Prabhat was appointed Officer of the Order of Canada in 2012 for his contributions to global health. He has received a number of other awards, including the 2022 Award of Excellence from the American Public Health Association and the 2012 American Cancer Society’s Luther L Terry Award for Outstanding Research Contribution for his globally influential research on tobacco control. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the US National Academy of Medicine.