Farrar's research interests are in infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, dengue fever, typhoid fever, malaria, and H5N1 influenza. From 1996 until 2013, Farrar was Director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ho Chi Minh City. In 2004, he and his Vietnamese colleague Tran Tinh Hien identified the re-emergence of the deadly bird flu, or H5N1, in humans. He was Professor of Tropical Medicine and Global Health at the University of Oxford from 2000 until 2013. In 2013, Farrar was appointed Director of the Wellcome Trust. During his time at the Wellcome Trust, with Chris Whitty and Neil Ferguson, he co-authored an article in Nature titled "Infectious disease: Tough choices to reduce Ebola transmission", explaining the UK government's response to Ebola in Sierra Leone, including the proposal to build and support centres where people could self-isolate voluntarily if they suspected that they could have the disease. Together with a number of others, in 2016 he proposed a World Serum Bank as a means of helping combat epidemics. In addition to his role at the Wellcome Trust, Farrar has served as chair on several advisory boards for governments and global organizations. From 2017 until 2019, he was a member of the German Ministry of Health’s International Advisory Board on Global Health, chaired by Ilona Kickbusch. He is also a member of the Health and Biomedical Sciences International Advisory Council at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research of Singapore. In the United Kingdom, he is part of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, led by Patrick Vallance, and Public Health England’s Serology Working Group. In May 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, he was appointed to the expert advisory group for the UK Government’s Vaccine Task Force. Farrar co-chaired the World Health Organization’s working group on dengue vaccines from 2015 until 2016. In 2017, he was part of the selection committee chaired by Jules A. Hoffmann that chose Stewart Cole as director of the Institut Pasteur. In 2019, he served on The Lancet Commission on Tuberculosis, co-chaired by Eric Goosby, Dean Jamison and Soumya Swaminathan. That same year, he also co-chaired a WHO committee evaluating Ebola therapeutics. Since its inception in 2017, Farrar has been chairing the Scientific Advisory Group of the WHO R&D Blueprint, a global strategy and preparedness plan that allows the rapid activation of research activities during epidemics. Since 2018, he has been serving on the joint World Bank/WHO Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, co-chaired by Elhadj As Sy and Gro Harlem Brundtland.
Farrar was the director of the Wellcome Trust in 2018, when bosses at the Wellcome Sanger Institute were accused of bullying staff.
Personal life
Farrar has been married to Christiane Dolecek, an Austrian-born typhoid researcher, since 1998. They have three children and live in Oxford. Since 2011, the family's Farrar Foundation has focused on providing educational assistance to youth from Vietnam and Nepal.
