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Dr. Prabhat Jha is the Canada Research Chair of Health and Development and a professor at the University of Toronto. He is also the founding director of the Centre for Global Health Research (www.cghr.org), Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, St. Michael's Hospital; research scholar at the McLaughlin Centre for Molecular Medicine; and professeur extraordinaire at the Université de Lausanne, Switzerland.

Dr. Jha is the lead author of Curbing the Epidemic: Governments and the Economics of Tobacco Control and co-editor of Tobacco Control in Developing Countries. Both are among the most influential books on tobacco control, with the first being translated into over 20 languages. He is the principal investigator of the “Million Death Study” in India, which examines child and adult mortality and their risk factors in 2.3 million homes and 15 million people. He also conducts studies of HIV transmission in various countries, is a co-editor of the Disease Control Priorities Project (www.dcp2.org), and advises several governments and institutions. Since being founded in 2002, the Centre for Global Health Research has expanded to 30 staff in Toronto, Bangalore and Delhi, and has recently opened the Lombard Insurance Global Poverty Action Lab in Toronto.

Dr. Jha was a senior scientist at the World Health Organization in Geneva, a senior health specialist at the World Bank in Washington, DC, and a research scholar at the University of Toronto and McMaster University in Canada. He has published widely on tobacco, HIV/AIDS, and health of the global poor. His awards include a gold medal from the Poland Health Promotion Foundation (2000), the Top 40 Canadians under Age 40 Award (2004), the Ontario Premier's Research Excellence Award (2004), Globe and Mail’s Leading Medical Scientists in Toronto (2008). Professor Jha holds an MD from the University of Manitoba and a DPhil in epidemiology and public health from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar.