Charles B. Holmes

Faculty Affiliate

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 during the Obama-Biden administration, where he led many policy and program initiatives to expand program impact and to improve the accountability of U.S. investments, and served as founding Director of the Office of Research and Science. In 2013 he become CEO of the Centre for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia (CIDRZ) where he spent four years leading a staff of over 1,000 improving 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 life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

In his current role at Georgetown, he provides strategic support to governments, 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, and 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.