Michele Barry


Michele Barry is Director of the Stanford University Center for Innovation in Global Health, and in 2018 was awarded the Elizabeth Blackwell Medal by the American Medical Women's Association.

Biography

A qualified physician and Fellow of the American College of Physicians, Barry has been Director of the Center for Innovation in Global Health at Stanford University since 2009, and is also Senior Associate Dean for Global Health at Stanford. In 2011 she also became a Fellow of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, of which she was also a past president. She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.
Prior to her appointment at Stanford, Barry was a Professor of medicine at Yale University and had worked at the university for 28 years. She is an advocate for women's rights in the medicine profession, and during her time at Yale, she wrote the first policy for maternity leave in the Department of Medicine. She created the Women Leaders in Global Health conference in response to the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions in global health.
She is Director of the Yale/Stanford Johnson & Johnson Global Health Scholars Program, which sends physicians to low resource settings in overseas countries, to improve health infrastructure.
Her research interests are in the fields of global health, tropical medicine, and emerging infectious diseases. She has written on the potential for pandemic disease in fragile states and areas of unrest and civil war, published in the journal Daedalus, which she sees as an important but underrepresented research area. Her research approach is transdisciplinary, taking into account the local context of global health issues such as infectious disease. In her work she highlights how areas of global unrest are often centres of emerging disease, and the complexities of the situation and of solutions.

Awards

In 2018 Barry was awarded the Elizabeth Blackwell Medal, a prize awarded annually by the American Medical Women's Association, to a woman physician for her outstanding contribution to the cause of women in medicine.
In 2010, she received the Ben Kean Medal, awarded to a clinician or educator for their dedication to clinical tropical medicine.

Personal life

Barry is married to Mark Cullen, also a doctor, and has two daughters.