Meaghan Thumath

Dr. Meaghan Thumath is an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia and a clinician scientist and director of strategy at Vancouver Coastal Health specializing in health equity during public health emergencies. Her work bridges clinical practice, research and policy to strengthen emergency response and preparedness, with a particular focus on human rights, gender and marginalized populations.

She is a public health delegate with the Red Cross and the World Health Emergencies Programme at the World Health Organization (WHO) and has provided technical expertise on global outbreak response efforts, including WHO’s COVID-19 response in South Africa and the Ebola response in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In addition to her work with WHO, she has conducted field research on infectious disease outbreaks with the Canadian Red Cross, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the World Bank in South Sudan, Haiti, Sierra Leone, Ukraine and Sri Lanka. Most recently she was an International Federation of Red Cross delegate supporting the leptospirosis outbreak response in Jamaica after Hurricane Melissa. 

In Canada, Dr. Thumath has played a key role in public health leadership, serving as chief of staff to the Minister of Mental Health and Addiction, a senior practice leader at the BC Centre for Disease Control, and the executive director of population and public health for the BC Ministry of Health. Her work has informed national and provincial health strategies on harm reduction, infectious disease control and health system preparedness.

She holds a doctorate in social intervention and policy evaluation from the University of Oxford, where she was a Trudeau Scholar at the Centre for Evidence-Based Intervention. She also has a Master of Science in public health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and maintains academic affiliations with the Women’s Health Research Institute, the BC Centre on Substance Use and Wolfson College at the University of Oxford. Dr. Thumath is a registered nurse with advanced practice certification in sexual and reproductive health and addiction medicine, integrating frontline experience with policy and research to advance health equity in public health emergencies.