Mariam Claeson, M.D., M.P.H., MDhc, is senior adviser for global public health at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, where she works on the political economy of adolescent mental health and well-being and on research collaborations focused on newborn critical care with academic institutions in Southeast Asia. She is the former director of the Global Financing Facility (GFF) for Every Woman Every Child at the World Bank and previously served as director of the maternal, newborn and child health team at the Gates Foundation.
Dr. Claeson was the program coordinator for the multisector response to AIDS in the South Asia region at the World Bank and task team leader for HIV operations in India and Afghanistan from 2005 to 2012. From 1998 to 2004, she served as lead public health specialist in the Health, Nutrition and Population Human Development Network at the World Bank. In this role, she contributed to health reform programs in Egypt, Jordan, Nigeria, Uzbekistan, China and the Philippines, including the development of innovative financing instruments such as a new lending instrument for multicountry malaria operations, a regional rapid-results agenda and buy-downs for global public goods.
Dr. Claeson also worked as a medical officer for the World Health Organization’s Global Programme for Control of Diarrhoeal Diseases, both globally and in Ethiopia, where she focused on national immunization and diarrheal disease control. She also worked as a physician in rural district-level clinical practice in Tanzania, Bangladesh and Bhutan.
Dr. Claeson is a commissioner on the Lancet Commission on Adolescent Health and Wellbeing. As a member of the Bellagio Study Group on Child Survival, she participated in the call to action on child survival and co-authored Knowledge Into Action for Child Survival in 2003. She also served as a member of the WHO-UNICEF-Lancet Commission on A Future for the World’s Children and co-authored the World Bank reports The Millennium Development Goals for Health: Rising to the Challenges and Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries, Second Edition. She was awarded an honorary doctor of medicine degree by the Karolinska Institutet in 2015.
