Udani Samarasekera

“I’m concerned that the narrative now around ageing populations is one of doom and gloom. But long-lived populations are not the problem. The problem is that we haven’t allowed people to get to an older age healthy”, says John Wong, Executive Director of the Centre for Population Health at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Executive Director of The Yong Pung How and Yong Wei-Woo Centre at the National University Health System (NUHS), Singapore. “Two-thirds of the world is now below

“I’m used to running multiple projects in my head at the same time,” says Gisela Terwindt, Professor of Neurology at Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC) and Director of the Leiden Headache Centre in the Netherlands.

In 2014, Krutika Kuppalli served as Medical Director of a large Ebola Treatment Unit (ETU) in Sierra Leone during the West African Ebola virus disease epidemic (2013–16).

When Mangenda Kamara became pregnant as a teenager in Sierra Leone, her community and secondary school teachers made her feel “very discouraged”, she recalls.

Alison Holmes is making plans. As the Director of the Fleming Initiative, a global partnership led by Imperial College London and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, to combat antimicrobial resistance (AMR), she wants to use the 2028 centenary of Sir Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin “to reflect upon it and honour its legacy. But also as a focus to make sure that, in spite of the geopolitical changes related to funding, that we keep on shining a spotlight on AMR as a major global ch

In 1986, Arri Coomarasamy, then a teenager, fled Sri Lanka's civil war with his family. “My mum woke us up in the middle of the night and said, ‘We are leaving.’ I didn’t get to say goodbye to my cousins or friends. We packed up that night...

“People with multiple long-term conditions [MLTC] do not like the word multimorbidity. We're not morbid, they say”, explains Kamlesh Khunti, Professor of Primary Care Diabetes and Vascular Medicine at the University of Leicester, UK.

Uwe Reuter admits that he originally wanted to become a gastroenterologist rather than a neurologist. Although he recalls that, during his medical training, “I thought the brain and the new imaging technologies were fascinating, so neurology would de

As a neurology resident at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), USA, in the 1970s, Stephen Hauser met Andrea, a critically ill young patient with multiple sclerosis (MS) and acute severe hemiplegia.

“If you conduct community-based research, you have to understand the context”, says Christina Economos, Dean, Professor, and New Balance Chair in Childhood Nutrition at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Tufts University, Boston, MA, USA. “And because that's something I really appreciate and enjoy, I’ve been on the ground a lot over the past 30 years. I’ve gone to many places, met lots of people, made observations and shifted my mental models because of it.”

Respiratory medicine is deeply connected to social and structural determinants of health in terms of the diseases that we try to prevent and we treat.

Natalie Feldman is passionate about her work in reproductive psychiatry, but the field was not on her radar when she went to medical school. “I didn’t realise it existed”, she recalls. Attending a women's mental health conference in her first year introduced her to the field. There, she heard Samantha Meltzer-Brody, a leading expert in postnatal depression, give the keynote speech. “I felt like it clicked immediately, like ‘Oh, this is so much of what I care about, and this is absolutely what I

“We have many challenges but at the same time we have a lot of strength”, says Maria Antonieta Alcalde Castro, the new Director General of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF). Speaking to The Lancet before taking up her 4-year term on March 1, 2026, she says, “I want IPPF to remain a trusted partner and provider of high quality sexual and reproductive health [SRH] services, especially for those who are underserved, continue to be unapologetically a global voice for bodily auto

Paediatrician Naveen Thacker, Executive Director of the International Pediatric Association (IPA), is a lifelong immunisation advocate and global paediatrics leader. He was a key player in India's eradication of polio in 2014, and has since worked to share the lessons worldwide. A key component for him is trust, and he and colleagues set up the IPA's Vaccine Trust Project, a training programme to help health professionals communicate effectively with the public about vaccination. “Vaccination sa

Deniz Gökengin thinks colleagues view her as “a very serious, hardworking, meticulous, control-freak type of person”. But she has another side. “I am very compassionate. I have a lot of compassion for people in need, animals, the environment, plants, and the world. So my inner and outer shells are different, but I think they complement each other”, she says. Gökengin is a professor of infectious diseases in the Department of Infectious Diseases and Clinical Microbiology at Ege University, Izmir,

The world has witnessed many research giants in nutrition. Carlos A Monteiro, Emeritus Professor of Nutrition and Public Health at the School of Public Health, University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil, and Founder of the USP Center for Epidemiological Studies in Health and Nutrition, is easily among them. In 2009, Monteiro and his team coined the term ultra-processed foods (UPFs) and went on to develop the Nova food classification system, which groups foods according to their processing. Nova paved

For Somali-American paediatrician Anisa Ibrahim, childhood was fraught with uncertainty. By the time she was 5 years old, civil war had broken out in Somalia and when the conflict escalated, her family fled to neighbouring Kenya and lived in a refugee camp. “There were a lot of sick people. I remember adults always talking about TB outbreaks or being concerned about malaria”, she recalls. After a year in the camp, in 1993, Ibrahim and her family were resettled as refugees to Seattle, WA, USA, wh

Cuilin Zhang is Chair Professor on Women's Health at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (National University of Singapore [NUS] Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, Singapore) and the founding Director of the Global Centre for Asian Women's Health (Singapore). Her research in women's health has a focus on nutrition and cardiometabolic health. She was born and raised in Harbin, the capital city of China's northeast province. Harbin is famous for hosting an international ice sculpture festiv

“Almost half of the world's population are women, and the latest stats show us that less than 50% of women and girls have power over their health-care decisions”, says Shakira Choonara, a passionate public health practitioner and activist working in the multilateral agency space. Her current focus area is sexual health and reproductive rights (SRHR) and bodily autonomy. Choonara wants to see governments boost investment for SRHR, given the current backlash from certain groups. “SRHR is under att

People have multiple identities, but this fact can be overshadowed by the diagnosis of a disease. Formed in 1991 by the late Sivananda Khan, an HIV and gay rights activist, the Naz Project London (Naz) realised that people living with HIV in South Asian communities needed support encompassing their multiple identities of faith, sexuality, gender identity, and ethnicity. “So those four core intersections were our starting point. That's why we existed, because we recognised people who were coming