Dr. Anthony So, Director

Director

Dr. Anthony So serves as Professor of the Practice of Public Policy Studies at Duke University’s Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, where he started the Program on Global Health and Technology Access in 2004. Dr. So's research on the ownership of knowledge and how it is best harnessed to improve the public’s health spans from conceptualizing a technology trust and patent pools to reengineering the value chain from R&D to the delivery of health technologies for developing countries.

Previously, Dr. So had served as Associate Director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Health Equity program, where he co-founded a cross-thematic program on charting a fairer course for intellectual property rights, shaped the Foundation’s work on access to medicines policy in developing countries, and launched a multi-country program in Southeast Asia, “Trading Tobacco for Health,” focused on enabling countries to respond on their own terms and for the long term to the challenge of tobacco use. Prior to joining the Foundation, Dr. So served as Senior Advisor to the Administrator at the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), and from 1995-96, he served as Secretary Donna Shalala’s White House Fellow. A general internist by training, he also earned his M.P.A. from Princeton University as a Woodrow Wilson Scholar and completed a fellowship in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at the University of California, San Francisco/Stanford.

Dr. So has held a wide range of non-profit and advisory board positions, but presently serves on the Board of Directors for Community Catalyst, a U.S.-based national advocacy organization working to ensure quality affordable health care for all; sits on the Advisory Board for TropIKA, a new web-based research and policy portal from the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases (TDR); and is a member of the Advisory Board for Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, a student organization committed to improved access to medicines in developing countries, particularly by ensuring a socially responsible role for universities.