Jemilah Mahmood

Jemilah binti Mahmood is a Malaysian physician. She has served as Pro-Chancellor of the Heriot-Watt University Malaysia (HWUM) since September 2021, Professor and Executive Director of Sunway Centre for Planetary Health since August 2021, and Senior Fellow at the Adrienne-Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center. She has been a Board Member of Roche since 2022. She served as Special Advisor to the former Prime Minister of Malaysia Muhyiddin Yassin on Public Health from March 2020 to August 2021 and Under-Secretary General for Partnerships in the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) from January 2016 to 2020. Before joining the IFRC, she served as Chief of the Secretariat of the World Humanitarian Summit at the United Nations in New York, heading the humanitarian branch at the United National Population Fund, Chief of the Humanitarian Response Branch at UNFPA in 2011, President of the Malaysian Medical Relief Society from its foundation in June 1999 to a decade later in 2009. Mercy Malaysia is a medical charity she founded in June 1999, inspired by the Médecins Sans Frontières. In 2008, she was one of the 16 members appointed by Ban Ki-moon, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations to Advisory Group of the Central Emergency Response Fund.