Clare Wenham, Ph.D.

Center Affiliate

Clare Wenham is an Assistant Professor of Global Health Policy at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She specialises in global health security and the politics and policy of pandemic preparedness and outbreak response, through analysis of influenza, Ebola and Zika. Her work considers global health governance, role of WHO, national priorities and innovative financing for pandemic control. More recently she has been analysing the downstream effects of global health security policy on women, with a forthcoming OUP book offering a feminist critique of the Zika outbreak in Latin America. Her work features in The Lancet, BMJ, Security Dialogue, International Affairs, BMJ Global Health and Third World Quarterly. At LSE she is the director of the MSc in Global Health Policy at LSE and sits on the steering committee of the LSE Global Health Initiative. 

Clare is currently leading a Wellcome Trust funded project to understand the impact of the Zika outbreak on how women access abortion, and in particular medical abortion, and how national regulation in Brazil, Colombia, and El Salvador impacted on women’s choices and abortion service providers activity during the health emergency. Clare is also completing a book manuscript offering a feminist critique of global health security through analysis of the Zika outbreak. 

She previously worked at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, delivering projects relating to surveillance and transmission of infectious disease. Prior to this, she undertook a Ph.D. at the Centre for Health and International Relations at Aberystwyth University examining the tensions between global disease governance and individual state sovereignty. During this time, she was awarded a fellowship at the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology and consulted for the Asian Development Bank. Before starting her academic career, Clare worked in public health policy roles at the Faculty of Public Health and for an NHS Trust.