Executive director of IRD – Interactive Research and Development – Aamir Khan dreams of using cellphones to improve the provision of healthcare in Pakistan and uses his experience in the field to share his work with technology.

About the speaker:

Aamir Khan is an epidemiologist based in Karachi, Pakistan. He trained in medicine at the Aga Khan University and in public health at the Johns Hopkins University, where he is associate faculty. He is the founder and Executive Director of IRD since 2004, a research enterprise committed to improving global health and development through the use of appropriate technologies. Aamir also directs the Indus Hospital Research Center in Karachi. In addition to his work in Pakistan, Aamir has led large-scale surveys and established research studies in Tajikistan, the United States, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Mexico and Brazil over the past 15 years.

Aamir is co-founder of the Innovations in International Health (IIH) program based at the D-Lab at MIT and is a founding member of the openXdata.org consortium. He leads the End-User Requirements group on the OMEVAC (open source mobile data collection for vaccine trials) and mVAC (mobile innovations in recording child vaccination and health data in immunization registers) grants based at the University of Bergen.

IRD’s in-house mobile phone system (Interactive Alerts for Childhood Pneumonia) is a winning entry in the Design Triennial at the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City, on display till January 2011. Aamir serves on the Stop TB Partnership Working Group on MDR-TB based at the World Health Organization in Geneva and helped draft Pakistan’s successful USD 173 million Global Fund application for scaling up MDR-TB control.