Till Bärnighausen, MD, PhD, ScD

Prof. Dr. Dr. Till Bärnighausen is the Director of the Heidelberg Institute of Global Health (HIGH), one of the research centers in the Medical Faculty and University Hospital of the University of Heidelberg, Germany’s oldest university (1386). He is also the Alexander von Humboldt Professor at the University of Heidelberg and Senior Faculty at one of the five Global Programs of the British Welcome Trust, the Africa Health Research Institute (AHRI) in South Africa. 

Prof. Bärnighausen’s research focuses on identifying, designing and testing novel interventions to boost population health, addressing prevention and treatment needs for major diseases such as HIV, diabetes, hypertension and depression. He has led more than 30 large-scale population based and health systems randomized controlled trials and more than 100 quasi-experiments in Africa, Asia and Europe. His work has also contributed to our understanding of the major structural and behavioral drivers of population health and he has contributed novel applied methods for public health and health systems research. 

Prof. Bärnighausen trained as a medical doctor and is a consultant and clinical specialist in Family Medicine. He previously worked as a Family Medicine doctor in Germany, China and South Africa, and as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company. Before taking the lead at HIGH, he was a faculty at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Prof. Bärnighausen holds doctoral degrees in International and Population Health (Harvard University, USA) and History of Medicine (Heidelberg University, Germany), as well as master’s degrees in Health Systems Management (LSH&TM, UK), Financial Economics (SOAS, UK), and Innovation and Entrepreneurship (HEC Paris, France).

Prof. Bärnighausen has published more than 550 peer-reviewed articles, including in Science, PNAS, Science Translational Medicine, Lancet, Lancet Global Health, JAMA, JAMA Internal Medicine, PLOS Medicine, and BMJ. His publications have been cited >55,000 times (for an index of 92). Prof. Bärnighausen serves on many global health committees and boards, including the NIH study section “Population and Public Health Approaches to HIV/AIDS (PPAH)”, the Scientific Advisory Board of the University of Pennsylvania’s Population Aging Research Center (PARC), and the UNAIDS Evaluation Expert Advisory Committee, Financing Advisory Board, and the Program Impact Modelling Advisory Group (PIMAG).