PROFILE
 

Annie Sparrow is a paediatric intensivist and global health specialist accredited in Australia, Britain and the US. She combines her clinical and public health expertise acquired from working in some of the world’s most marginalized places and war-torn countries with human rights advocacy to influence high-level policy.  From Flying Doctor in the Australian outback to Human Rights Watch via Harvard School of Public Health, her innovative research into war crimes in Darfur resulted in unprecedented public engagement and testimony at the International Criminal Court.

After learning the law, she spent several years in Nairobi with Catholic Relief Services’ Emergency Response Team and another year with UNICEF implementing Global Fund's $27M malaria grant in Somalia. In 2012 she joined the faculty at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where she teaches humanitarian aid in complex emergencies and researches the impact of violations of human rights and humanitarian law on population health. She developed the concept of the weaponization of healthcare—deploying people's need for healthcare against them, to amplify suffering and escalate forced displacement.

In Syria, she trained physicians in trauma and infectious disease, and advocated relentlessly on their behalf. In eastern Congo, on Idjwi island where the life expectancy is just 25 years, she works each fall with local health workers and teachers to treat hundreds of children for severe malnutrition, malaria, monkey pox and other awful diseases to improve school attendance and achieve gender equity in graduation.  
In addition to publishing in prestigious peer-reviewed journals, she writes regularly for Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, and the New York Review, on the instrumentalization of WHO, the weaponization of healthcare and the new biological warfare, pandemic threats, and the politics of public health. A new area of research is Global Sport, Health and Human Rights.