Pandemic Center
Senior Adviser Wilmot James smiles at camera, while posing inside a campus building.

Wilmot James, Ph.D.

Senior Adviser to the Brown Pandemic Center, Professor of the Practice of Health Services, Policy and Practice at the Brown University School of Public Health
wilmot_james@brown.edu
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Biography

Dr. James, an internationally recognized thought leader in biosecurity, global health, and pandemic preparedness, is a Senior Adviser to the Pandemic Center and a Professor of the Practice of Health Services, Policy and Practice.

Dr. James has served as a Member of Parliament and Shadow Minister of Health in South Africa, and most recently held positions at Columbia University as Senior Research Scholar at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy and as Chair of the Center for Pandemic Research in the College of Arts and Sciences. Wilmot serves as an advisor to the G7-led Global Partnership's Signature Initiative to Mitigate Biological Threats in Africa and on the boards of BEACON, Resolve to Save Lives and the Mirror Biology Dialogue Fund. Dr. James will use his extensive experience to address public health and national security challenges in his role as senior advisor to the Pandemic Center.

Recent News

Nature | Africa

Africa’s pandemic preparedness improves, but safety gaps remain

A new Africa-specific health security index finds strong gains in laboratories and disease surveillance since 2021, but biosecurity, biosafety and systems for delivering vaccines and treatments continue to lag.

African countries have spent the past five years building laboratories, expanding disease surveillance and improving outbreak detection. Now, the continent’s first health security assessment cautions that the next stage of preparedness will depend on making those investments safer, better connected and more resilient.
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News Ghana

Report Ties Ebola Outbreak to Africa’s Security Gaps

A new Africa Health Security Index released Wednesday found the continent’s average preparedness score has risen nearly 30 percent in five years to 41.5 out of 100, but its biosecurity and biosafety scores remain critically low even as an Ebola outbreak spreads across the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda.
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IPS News Agency

Africa’s Health Defenses Have Improved But Its Funding Has Not

Against the backdrop of an Ebola disease outbreak, the new Africa Health Security (AHS) Index, released today, reveals significant gaps in critical health infrastructure despite important progress in health security capacity in recent years.
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Daily Maverick

Beyond infrastructure: Training the biosecurity leaders Africa needs

As natural outbreaks, laboratory accidents and the deliberate misuse of biological agents converge into an increasingly complex threat environment, Africa’s ability to prevent, detect and respond will depend on a sustained investment in the people capable of doing so.
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Helena

Seeing the Signal Before the Storm

Over the past two decades, we have grown accustomed to describing pandemics and biological emergencies as “once-in-a-generation” events. That framing no longer holds. What we are facing is not a sequence of rare shocks, but a structural shift in risk—one driven by climate disruption, ecological pressure, global mobility, and the accelerating convergence of artificial intelligence with the life sciences.

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Brown Daily Herald

Pandemic Center receives $900,000 grant for biosecurity program in Africa

The School of Public Health’s Pandemic Center received a $900,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to launch a program for mid-career professionals in Africa designed to provide specialized training on biological threat reduction policy. The three-year initiative is set to launch in summer 2026 and will include a 9–10-week online course and a yearlong fellowship.

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