Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Faculty Member

Jerome Amir Singh BA, LLB, LLM, MHSc, PhD

Research Interests

Health ethics

Law

Governance

International Humanitarian Law and Ethics

Climate change

Planetary Health

Jerome Amir Singh is Adjunct Professor in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, and Honorary Research Fellow at the Howard College School of Law, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa. He serves as the Principal Investigator of the Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (SAGE), which operates under the auspices of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf). Dr Singh serves as an ad hoc Consultant to several United Nation entities, including the World Health Organisation (WHO), UNAIDS, and UNICEF. He currently serves as a Consultant to the WHO on climate change, health, ethics, and equity. He has previously served as a Consultant to the WHO on a wide range of issues, including XDR-TB, HIV, avian flu, COVID-19, gene drive research, adolescent health research, Artificial Intelligence, and identifying and connecting known, new or emerging issues that could significantly impact global health. In 2017, Dr Singh was appointed by the WHO Director-General (DG) to serve as a member of WHO’s International Health Regulations ‘Public Health Emergency of International Concern’ Expert Roster. In 2020, he was appointed by the WHO DG to serve as a member of the WHO’s Ad Hoc Research Ethics Review Committee (ERC) for COVID-19, which went on to function as an emergency review committee for research on other health threats of international concern, such as Ebola and Monkeypox. In 2023, he was reappointed by the WHO DG to the reconstituted WHO Emergencies Research Ethics Review Committee. In 2020, Dr Singh was appointed to the WHO’s Technical Advisory Group (TAG) for Emergency Use Listing, which is mandated to review candidate interventions for public health emergency contexts. To date, the TAG has evaluated multiple COVID-19 vaccines. He currently serves on the WHO Expert Group on the Ethics & Governance of Infectious Disease Outbreaks and Other Emergencies of Public Health Importance, the WHO Expert Group on Ethics & Governance of Artificial Intelligence, and the WHO Working Group for Ethics and Monkeypox. Dr Singh currently serves on the International Ethics Review Board of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and serves as an Independent Ethics Advisor to the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation (“CERI”). He chairs the US NIH-funded Ethics Working Group of the HIV Prevention Trial Network (HPTN), serves on the Steering Committee of the International AIDS Society Global Scientific Cure Strategy (GCS), the HIV Vaccine Network’s Efficacy Trials Working Group, the South African National AIDS Council (SANAC) Legal and Human Rights Technical Task Team, and the Bioethics Advisory Panel of the South African Medical Research Council (SA MRC). He has previously co-directed the Ethical, Social, and Cultural Issues Advisory Services of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative.

Primary Teaching Responsibilities

• Global Health Governance (core module of the graduate certificate in Global Health for medical residents and fellows): Global Health Education Initiative, Postgraduate Medical Education, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
• Planetary and Global Health Ethics (graduate course): Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, Canada;
• Bioethics and the Law (graduate course): Howard College School of Law, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa.