Dr. Barbara Profeta

Barbara Profeta has over twenty years of overseas experience in humanitarian and development work, across a variety of positions and organizations, including the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement, the UN family, NGO and private consulting firms. She has been managing offices and programmes in a dozen of different countries on four continents, with a major focus on fragile and conflict-affected environments. Holder of a PhD on International Public Health and Policy at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, since 2008 Barbara has engaged in programmatic and advocacy work related to the strengthening of distressed health systems and linking research and operations. She holds a Deputy Head of Cooperation position at the Swiss Development Cooperation (SDC) office in Niamey, Niger. In parallel, she is a board member of the Thematic Working Group on Fragile and Conflict Affected States and an advisory group member of the Private Sector Engagement Thematic Working Group attached to the Health Systems Global research network (http://www.healthsystemsglobal.org/).

Since 2021, she is also Honorary affiliate at the Institute of Development Studies (UK) and Sussex University, as well as a member of the Advisory Board of the QuEST and QuESTLAC initiatives (https://questnetwork.org/harvard-center ; https://www.redquest-lac.org/). More recently, she has been appointed as Faculty Adjunct at the Dermatology Hospital of Southern Medical University in Guangzhou (China), where she co-supervises PhD students from LMICs and organizes occasional lectures on Global Health and Development.