Oliver Johnson is a senior lecturer in global health and health systems science and director of King’s College London’s Global Health Partnerships. He is a senior fellow at the Georgetown University Global Health Institute and visiting researcher at the University of Witwatersrand. He serves as a commissioner on both the Georgetown-Lancet Commission on Faith, Trust, and Health and the Lancet Commission on Health Systems Performance Assessment.
From 2013 to 2015, he was based in Freetown, Sierra Leone, where he served as the founding director of the King’s College London Sierra Leone partnership, a health systems strengthening program embedded in the country’s main teaching hospital and medical school. From 2015 to 2022, he was based in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he worked with Africa Health Placements, a South African nonprofit focused recruiting and retaining health workers in rural government hospitals.
After completing his Ph.D., he was recruited in 2023 to be the first managing director of the Georgetown University Global Health Institute, working with the university’s leadership and senior faculty on global health strategy, establishing interdisciplinary research collaboratives, and running a global health student fellows program. In 2025, he moved back to the United Kingdom to rejoin King’s College London.
Career Highlights
- Studied medicine at King’s College London and international health at University College London.
- Helped to establish a Centre for Global Health at King’s College London and led the development of several global health teaching programs.
- Recruited by Lord Nigel Crisp to be the first policy director for the All-Party Group on Global Health in the U.K. Parliament.
- Co-authored a book on the Sierra Leone’s response to the 2015 Ebola outbreak titled Getting To Zero (2018).