Charles B. Holmes, MD, MPH

Posted in People

Director, Center for Innovation in Global Health, and Professor of Medicine, Georgetown Medical School. Distinguished Scholar and Program Director, O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law

Dr. Charles B. Holmes is the Director of the Georgetown Center for Innovation in Global Health, a Professor of Medicine at Georgetown University Medical Center, and serves as a Distinguished Scholar and Program Director at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. Dr. Holmes is a physician who has held senior global health leadership roles in government, academia, and non-governmental organizations. He served as Chief Medical Officer and Deputy U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator for PEPFAR in the Department of State under Ambassador Eric Goosby during the Obama-Biden administration. In that role, he built diverse teams, led many policy and program initiatives to expand program impact and improve the accountability of U.S. investments, and served as the founding Director of the Office of Research and Science. In 2013, he became CEO of the Centre for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia (CIDRZ), where he spent four years leading a staff of over 1,000 to improve the quality and reach of Zambia’s national healthcare system, from maternal health to cholera control and epidemic preparedness, including care for over 200,000 people living with HIV. Dr. Holmes has extensive diplomatic experience working with government health and finance officials and civil society in many countries and is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

In his current role at Georgetown he provides strategic support to governments and multi-lateral and private sector organizations for improved health systems responses to epidemics and other diseases, and leads research to optimize health systems performance. He is a frequent advisor to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization (WHO) where he serves as Co-Chair of the WHO Global Working Group for HIV Service Quality. He previously served as a consultant to the Office of the Vice President of Malawi, joining the locally-led team formulating Malawi’s successful first round Global Fund application. Dr. Holmes is widely published in the research and policy literature, and collaborated with former Senate Majority Leaders, Bill Frist and Tom Daschle to write a highly cited 2018 report on Strategic Health Diplomacy for the Bipartisan Policy Center. Dr. Holmes trained in internal medicine and infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He has served on the faculty of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine since 2011, where he has been an attending physician on the Mann infectious disease consult service at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and continues to serve as adjunct faculty.

Latest Posts from Charles

Proposed withdrawal from WHO is ‘deadly and wrong’

June 15th, 2020

CIGH Director, Dr. Charles Holmes, was featured in an Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) press briefing on President Trump’s decision to halt funding to the World Health Organization, and…