Jeremy Farrar

Director, Wellcome Trust

Sir Jeremy Farrar OBE FMedSci FRS is the Director of Wellcome, a global charitable foundation which supports science to solve urgent health challenges. As part of the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, he is a member of the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), the UK Vaccine Taskforce and the Principles Group of the ACT-Accelerator hosted by the World Health Organization (WHO), and he chairs the WHO R&D Blueprint Advisory Group. He joined Wellcome as Director in 2013.

Sir Farrar spent 18 years leading the Clinical Research Unit at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, where he made many pivotal advances in the understanding of diseases like tuberculosis (TB), malaria, typhoid, dengue and influenza, as well as helping to train scientists from across South-east Asia and beyond. He was named 12th in the Fortune list of World’s 50 Greatest Leaders in 2015 and was awarded the Memorial Medal and Ho Chi Minh City Medal from the Government of Vietnam for services to public health, medicine and research. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the European Molecular Biology Organization, the US National Academies and the UK Academy of Medical Sciences.

Born in Singapore, he holds degrees in immunology and medicine from University College London and a doctorate in neuroimmunology from the University of Oxford. He trained as a doctor in London, Edinburgh, Melbourne, San Francisco and Oxford.

Featured work

External publication

A Global Deal for Our Pandemic Age

Report of the G20 High Level Independent Panel on Financing the Global Commons for Pandemic Preparedness and Response.

Lucrezia Reichlin, Guntram B. Wolff, Jean-Claude Trichet, Min ZHU, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Ana Botin, Masood Ahmed, Vera Songwe, Jeremy Farrar, Lawrence H. Summers, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Jacob Frenkel, Rebeca Grynspan, Naoko Ishii, Michael Kremer, Kira Mazumdar-Shaw, Luis Alberto Moreno, John-Arne Røttingen, Mark Suzman, Tidjane Thiam, Ngaire Woods and Victor Dzau