Joia Mukherjee

Dr. Joia Mukherjee (born 1964) is a professor at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine.

Mukherjee was born in what was then known as East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Her father was a native of India and in 1972 her family was among the 10 million refugees in West Bengal fleeing the war in East Pakistan.

Mukherjee has a bachelors degree from the University of Michigan, a masters degree from Michigan State University and an MD from the University of Minnesota. She did the first part of her residency at the University of Minnesota Hospital and then trained in Infectious Disease, Internal Medicine, and Pediatrics at the Massachusetts General Hospital and has an MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health. Joia has been involved in health care access and human rights issues since 1989 in the United States, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the countries of the former Soviet Union. In 1999, she began working with Partners In Health and in 2000 became Partners In Health's Medical Director. PIH is an international medical charity with clinical programs in Haiti, Rwanda, Lesotho, Malawi, Peru, Mexico, Russia, and inner-city Boston. Currently, Dr. Mukherjee also is the Director of the Institute of Health and Social Justice, the Advocacy arm of Partners In Health. Dr. Mukherjee consults for the World Health Organization on the treatment of HIV and MDR-TB in developing countries and is a member of the Executive Board of Health Action AIDS, a campaign conducted with Physicians for Human Rights to engage the US health professional community in the international advocacy and education effort to stop the global AIDS pandemic.

In rural Haiti, Dr. Mukherjee along with colleagues Drs. Paul Farmer and Fernet Leandre has established a program to treat patients with HIV infection using highly active antiretroviral therapy. This program, the HIV Equity Initiative, was the first of its kind in a developing country and served as a model for the Millennium Development Goals, the WHO’s 3 by 5 initiative, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria. Dr. Mukherjee is an associate professor at the Harvard Medical School where she teaches Social Medicine and Infectious Disease to medical students, residents and fellows. Her scholarly work focuses on the human-rights aspects of HIV treatment and on the implementation of complex health interventions in resource-poor settings.

External links

• Article on Joia Mukherjee Z-mag 2005
• Commencement address of Joia Mukherjee, University of Minnesota Medical School, 2005
• Biosketch of Joia Mukherjee, Brigham and Women's Hospital
• Video lecture of Joia Mukherjee, University of Wisconsin, 2007
• Book preface, Sickness and Wealth: the Corporate Assault on Global Health, by Joia Mukherjee
• Democracy Now! interview with Dr. Joia Mukherjee on HIV drugs and patent issues, 2007