Nina Schwalbe is a senior scholar at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law.
Schwalbe is also the CEO and founder of Spark Street Advisors, a think-tank and global advisory firm focused on improving public health outcomes. Her leadership positions have included deputy executive secretary and managing director at Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, where she led Gavi’s work in strategic planning, policy development, market-shaping, performance management, and monitoring and evaluation; principal advisor and acting chief of health at UNICEF, overseeing programs in over 150 countries; and founding director of Open Society Institute’s Global Public Health Program.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Schwalbe established USAID’s COVID-19 Vaccine Access and Delivery Initiative, where she led the distribution of one billion vaccine doses to low- and lower-middle-income countries. She also co-chaired the WHO-UNESCO Research Network Working Group on Educational Institutions and COVID-19.
Schwalbe’s scholarship ranges from vaccine equity to the role of artificial intelligence in global public health. She has published extensively in The Lancet, the British Medical Journal, Vaccines, and other peer-reviewed journals and has written about public health for the Atlantic, Foreign Policy, the Financial Times, STAT News, and The Washington Post, among others.
Schwalbe is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a principal visiting fellow at the United Nations International Institute for Global Health, and an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health.
She holds a B.A. from Harvard University, an MPH from Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, and a Ph.D. from the University of Witwatersrand.