Hugo López-Gatell Ramírez


Hugo López-Gatell Ramírez is a Mexican epidemiologist, author, and infectious diseases expert, who has served as head of the Undersecretariat of Prevention and Health Promotion at the Mexican Secretariat of Health since 2018. Since January 2020, he has also played a major role as a spokesman and one of the lead members of the task force addressing the COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico.

Career

Education

López-Gatell attended the School of Medicine of the National Autonomous University of Mexico graduating in 1994 as Physician-Surgeon. Afterwards, he obtained a master's degree in Medical Sciences at UNAM in 2000, and later a Ph.D degree in epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health at the Johns Hopkins University in 2006.
As a researcher, he has written and participated in 40 papers, and in 2020 he had been cited an estimated of 6,457 times. In addition to clinical and academic roles, López-Gatell serves as an associate editor for scientific journals as Global Health Action of the Umeå Center for Global Health Research, The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, AIDS and the academic journal of the Salvador Zubirán National Institute of Health Sciences and Nutrition.

Public service

In 1998 he was appointed as Chief of Resident Doctors at INCMNSZ serving and as Medical Specialist A from 1999 to 2001. From 2013 to 2018 he was Director of Innovation on Infectious Disease Surveillance and Control at Mexican Secretariat of Health. In 2008 he was appointed as deputy general director of Epidemiology at the same secretariat. In that role, he led the creation of the National Epidemiological Surveillance System, a re-engineering of the Mexican public health system to improve reporting and detection of epidemiological surveillance.
On December 1, 2018, López-Gatell was appointed by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador head of the Undersecretariat of Prevention and Health Promotion in the Secretariat of Health. From the beginning of 2020 and after the rising of the COVID-19 pandemic López-Gatell has also applied his research and public service expertise as one of the main strategist and main spokesperson of Mexican Government on the 2020 coronavirus pandemic in Mexico. From March 6, 2020, López-Gatell is conducting a daily press conference where he and the Secretariat of Health directives are giving information also explanations about the official strategies and decisions.
The World Health Organization invited López-Gatell to join its team of experts in public health on May 24, 2020.

Honors and awards