Wafaa El-Sadr

Wafaa El-Sadr, M.D., MPH, M.P.A., is the founder and director of ICAP and an international expert in infectious diseases and public health. Her work through ICAP in more than 30 countries integrates research, education, training and program design, implementation, scale-up, and evaluation. She aims to address major public health challenges through partnership, innovation, and collaboration. As the director of Columbia World Projects, she oversees a university-wide initiative that aims at taking scholarly work into action. She is also a principal investigator of the National Institutes of Health-funded HIV Prevention Trials Network.

El-Sadr received her medical degree from Cairo University in Egypt, a master’s degree in public health (epidemiology) from Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, and a master’s degree in public administration from the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government. She was named a MacArthur fellow in 2008, is a member of the National Academy of Medicine in 2009, a fellow of the African Academy of Sciences in 2018, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations in 2021.