Lawrence Gostin is the faculty director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, and the founding O’Neill chair in global health law. He is a university professor, Georgetown University’s highest academic rank, as well as a professor of medicine at Georgetown University and professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University.
Gostin is also the director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. He is on the WHO’s International Health Regulations (IHR) roster of experts and the WHO expert advisory panel on mental health. Gostin has served on the director-general’s advisory committee on reforming the World Health Organization, and numerous WHO expert advisory committees, including on the Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Framework, smallpox, and genomic sequencing data. Gostin was a member of two global commissions to report on the lessons learned from the 2015 West Africa Ebola epidemic, was a senior advisor to the United Nations secretary general’s post-Ebola commission, and served on the drafting team for the G-7 Summit in Tokyo in 2016. He also co-chairs the Lancet Commission on Global Health Law. Gostin serves as a member of the Independent Panel for a Global Public Health Convention, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Gostin holds multiple international academic professorial appointments, including at the University of Oxford and University of Sydney. He has numerous editorial appointments in leading academic journals, including Law and Global Health editor for the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). He has been awarded four honorary degrees. He is also a member of the National Academy of Medicine and serves on its Global Health Board. He’s also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a fellow of the Hastings Center. In 2016, U.S. President Barack Obama appointed Gostin to a six-year term on the President’s National Cancer Advisory Board to advise the nation on cancer prevention, research, and policy.
Gostin has received distinguished service awards, inter alia, from the National Academy of Sciences, the American Public Health Association, and Royal Society of Public Health. In the United Kingdom, he received the Rosemary Delbridge Memorial Award for the person “who has most influenced Parliament and government to act for the welfare of society.”
