Madhukar Pai

Madhukar Pai (also known as Madhu Pai) is a medical doctor, academic, advocate, writer, and university professor. Pai's work is around global health, specifically advocacy for better treatment for tuberculosis with a focus on South Africa and India. Pai is the Canada Research Chair of Epidemiology and Global Health at McGill University.

Education

Pai completed medical training and his community medicine residency at the Christian Medical CollegeVellore, India. He received his Ph.D in epidemiology from University of California, Berkeley. He also did a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California San Francisco.

Committees and editorial boards

Pai serves on the Scientific Advisory Committee of FIND (the global alliance for diagnostics) and is on the World Health Organization's Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on In Vitro Diagnostics and the Access Advisory Committee of TB Alliance. He is the Chair of the Public-Private Mix Working Group of the Stop TB Partnership. Pai is also on the editorial boards of BMJ Global Health, PLoS Medicine, Lancet Infectious Diseases, and is an Editor-in-Chief of PLOS Global Public Health.

Advocacy

Pai is a frequent media commentator on the COVID-19 pandemic in India, and in 2021 drew comparisons of the collective global action taken in response to the COVID19 pandemic versus the relative inaction towards tuberculosis. His 2021 paper in PLOS Medicine addressed power asymmetries in global health.

In 2020 and in 2021 he published papers and contributions about the decolonisation of global health work.

In 2021, Pai was critical of the global failure to widely vaccinate people against COVID-19, accused high-income nations of vaccine hoarding, and called for a waiver of intellectual property laws regarding COVID19 vaccines. In 2022 he described the global response to COVID-19 as an "unmitigated disaster".

Awards

• Chanchlani Global Health Research Award 2012
• Union Scientific Prize
• Haile T. Debas Prize
• David Johnston Faculty & Staff Award

Selected publications

• Madhukar Pai; Alice Zwerling; Dick Menzies (5 August 2008). "Systematic review: T-cell-based assays for the diagnosis of latent tuberculosis infection: an update". Annals of Internal Medicine. 149 (3): 177–184. doi:10.7326/0003-4819-149-3-200808050-00241. ISSN 0003-4819. PMC 2951987. PMID 18593687. Wikidata Q22241138.
• Jennifer Furin; Helen Cox; Madhukar Pai (20 March 2019). "Tuberculosis". The Lancet. 393 (10181): 1642–1656. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(19)30308-3. ISSN 0140-6736. PMID 30904262. Wikidata Q92572130.
• Khan, Themrise; Abimbola, Seye; Kyobutungi, Catherine; Pai, Madhukar (2022-06-01). "How we classify countries and people—and why it matters". BMJ Global Health. 7 (6): e009704. doi:10.1136/bmjgh-2022-009704. ISSN 2059-7908. PMC 9185389. PMID 35672117.