Christopher Dye
Christopher Dye FRS, FMedSci is a biologist, epidemiologist and public health specialist. He is Emeritus Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Oxford and formerly Director of Strategy at the World Health Organization.
Career
Chris Dye trained as a biologist and ecologist but postgraduate research on mosquitoes led towards epidemiology and public health. Based at Imperial College and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine from 1982 to 1996, he studied bloodsucking insects as vectors of leishmaniasis, malaria and onchocerciasis in Africa, Asia and South America, and domestic and wild animals as reservoirs of human infection and disease.Joining the World Health Organization in 1996, he developed ways of analyzing the vast quantities of routine surveillance data collected by government health departments worldwide─extracting signal from noise to devise better methods for understanding and controlling tuberculosis, malaria, and Ebola and Zika viruses. From 2006 to 2009, he was also Gresham Professor of Physic, 35th in a lineage of professors that have given public lectures in the City of London since 1597.
As WHO Director of Strategy 2014–2018, he served as science advisor to the Director General, oversaw the production and dissemination of health information by WHO press and libraries, and coordinated WHO's work on health and the Sustainable Development Goals. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, where his research focuses on how choices and decisions are made for public and personal health. He has been Epidemiology Advisor to the Chinese [Center for Disease Control and Prevention], Gresham Professor of Physic, a member of Council of The Royal Society and the University of York, a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and the Oxford Martin School, and a long-time member of the Board of Reviewing Editors for the journal Science.
Honours and awards
Dye is a Fellow of The Royal Society, the Royal Society of Biology and the UK Academy of Medical Sciences. He delivered the Inaugural George W. Comstock Tuberculosis Lecture at Johns Hopkins, the Inaugural Gilbert Omenn '61 Lecture in Science Policy at Princeton, the Southwood Memorial Lecture at Oxford and the last ever Snell Memorial Lecture at the British Thoracic Society.Selected publications
- World Health Organization. Research for Universal Health Coverage. The World Health Report 2013.
- Dye, C. The Population Biology of Tuberculosis. Princeton University Press. Chinese edition 结核病种群生物学 published in 2017.
- Dye, C. Investing in Health and Wellbeing: When Prevention is Better than Cure. Oxford University Press, 2nd ed
- Dye, C. Snapshots of Science. My Take on Health, 1974-2024.