Madhukar Pai

Madhukar Pai (also known as Madhu Pai) is an Indian 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 inaugural Chair of the Department of Global and Public Health in the School of Population and Global Health and holds a Canada Research Chair in Epidemiology and Global Health at McGill University.

Education
Pai completed medical training and his community medicine residency at the Christian Medical College Vellore, 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