Janelle Winters is a postdoctoral researcher with the ‘Developing Humanitarian Medicine’ project (PI Bertrand Taithe) at the University of Manchester’s Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute and an associate member of the University of Oxford’s Faculty of History (Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine). Her research is on the intersection of global health governance, policy, and contemporary history.

Currently, she is developing case studies of the intersections of humanitarian medicine and drug markets, antimicrobial resistance, and neglected tropical diseases since the 1980s. As a historian embedded in a COVID-19 clinical trial run by the Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit from 2021-2023 (the COPCOV trial), she began ongoing research on the challenges of producing evidence during public health emergencies. Her forthcoming articles, “Constructing Success: The World Bank, Onchocerciasis Control, and What Lies Beneath Triumphalist Global Health Narratives” and “Clinical Trial Bureaucracy and the Risk of Therapeutic Inertia” build on these projects.

Previously, Janelle taught and contributed to global health history, ethics, epidemiology, and financing courses at the University of Edinburgh, University of Iowa, and Asian University for Women. She also worked in global health programme management, including as a study director for influenza vaccine global coordination policy at the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s Board on Global Health (“The Influenza Imperative” report co-edited with Peter Sands, 2020-2022); medical training manager for United Nations peacekeeping field hospital capacity building in East and West Africa (with the US Department of Defense’s African Peacekeeping Rapid Response Partnership, 2019-2020); and manager for India, Indonesia, and Egypt infectious disease control capacity building programmes at the American Society for Microbiology (US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention’s Global Health Security Agenda and Department of State’s Biosecurity Engagement Program grants, 2014-2016).

Janelle earned her PhD in population health sciences from the University of Edinburgh (2020), where her research with the Global Health Governance Programme (PI Devi Sridhar) focused on neglected tropical diseases, power in global health, and the legacy of the World Bank. She has a long-term commitment to interdisciplinarity and holds a MA in the history of medicine (Newcastle University 2012), MSc in epidemiology of microbial diseases (Yale University 2010), and BSc in both zoology and the history of science (University of Wisconsin-Madison 2009).