Prabhat Jha, MD OC, is an Indian-Canadian epidemiologist and health economist working in the field of global health and founding director of the Centre for Global Health Research at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, Canada. His research focuses primarily on premature mortality resulting from HIV/AIDS, tobacco, alcohol, malaria, maternal and child health, infectious and non-communicable diseases.
Early life
Jha was born in Ranchi, India the state of Jharkhand. When he was six years old, his family moved to Winnipeg Canada where his father, Bidhu Jha, worked as a civil engineer and went on to become an NDP member of Manitoba’s legislative assembly. Together with his older brother and younger sister, he was raised by his mother.
Education and work
Jha studied medicine at the University of Manitoba. After earning his MD he attended the University of Oxford in England as a Rhodes Scholar where he was mentored by statistician and epidemiologist Sir Richard Peto. He successfully defended his PhD in epidemiology and public health in 1992. After graduation Jha worked as a team leader at the World Bank, contributing to the development of the Second National HIV/AIDS Control Program in India. He later worked as a senior scientist in health and poverty for the World Health Organization’s Commission on Macroeconomics and Health. In 2002 he founded the Centre for Global Health Research at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, where he has directed a variety of large scale public health studies, most notably the Indian Million Death Study on premature mortality. Jha’s research focuses on the causes of premature death in developing countries worldwide, and he has been recognized internationally for his work on smoking and tobacco related mortality. He is also a member of the Disease Control Priorities Project. Jha has been a Senior Fellow of Massey College at the University of Toronto, Canada since 2006 and in 2007 he became a professor of epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. In 2010 Jha was appointed the inaugural Endowed Chair in Disease Control at the Dalla Lana School. Jha has served as a health advisor to several governments including the Government of Canada on the Ministerial Advisory Committee on Tobacco Control, the Government of South Africa on its National Health Insurance Expert Committee, and the Government of India on the Advisory Committee for the National AIDS Control Organization. He is a senior editor of the scientific journal eLife and an International Advisory Board Member for The Lancet Global Health journal. Jha is the lead research behind the Action to Beat Coronavirus study, where Unity Health, the University of Toronto and the Angus Reid Forum have teamed up to look at the prevalence of COVID-19 antibodies among 10,000 Canadians.
Awards and honours
Rhodes Scholar, University of Oxford, Oxford, England
Top 40 Canadians under Age 40 Award
The Ontario Premier’s Research Excellence Award
The Luther Terry Award for Research on Tobacco Control “for Ground breaking Research on Tobacco Control”
Officer of the Order of Canada “For his contributions to epidemiology and the economics of global health, which have influenced the development of global health policy”
Prabhat Jha, Frank Chaloupka Tobacco Control in Developing Countries, Oxford University Press,
Dean T Jamison, Joel G Breman, Anthony R Measham, George Alleyne, Mariam Claeson, David B Evans, Prabhat Jha, Anne Mills, and Philip Musgrove Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries, Washington : World Bank,
Dean T. Jamison, Joel G. Breman, Anthony R. Measham, George Alleyne, Mariam Claeson, David B. Evans, Prabhat Jha, Anne Mills, Philip Musgrove Priorities in Health: Disease Control Priorities Companion Volume, World Bank Publications,
