Dr Palitha Abeykoon
Senior Advisor to the Ministry of Health of Sri Lanka and a former WHO Special Envoy for COVID-19 Preparedness and Response
Biography
Dr Palitha Abeykoon is a senior physician and public health professional from Sri Lanka, with postgraduate education and training from the universities of Sri Lanka, Geneva, Southern California, and the Harvard School of Public Health, where he was a Taro Takemi Fellow.
Until recently he was one of the WHO Director-General’s Special Envoys for COVID-19. He is Senior Advisor to the Ministry of Health of Sri Lanka, serves on the National Advisory Committee on Communicable Diseases and is a former president of the Sri Lanka Medical Association and the Sri Lanka Medical Council.
He is the recipient of numerous academic awards, including the Dr Fred Katz Award of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Medical Education, WHO Director-General’s No Tobacco Award, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the South-East Asia Public Health Education Network, and, most recently, the Kazue McLaren Leadership Achievement Award of the Asia Pacific Academic Consortium for Public Health. Recently he was elected a Fellow of the International Science Council.
He was the Director of Health Systems Development and Non-Communicable Diseases at the WHO South-East Asia Regional Office, and also served as the WHO Representative to India. Dr Abeykoon has been a regular consultant in health policy and health systems to international agencies, working in most of the countries of South-East Asia.
Dr Abeykoon has published widely in international journals, written chapters in books on public health and medical education, and most recently edited the “Sri Lanka Health in Transition” and the “History of Medicine in Sri Lanka ”.