Vanessa Kerry

Biography

Dr. Kerry is the co-founder and CEO of Seed Global Health (Seed), a non-profit that focuses on the power of investing in health and the health workforce for social well-being, economic growth, equity which transforms countries. Through partnership with governments and in-country academic institutions, under Vanessa’s tenure Seed has helped train more than 20,000 doctors, nurses and midwives and has impacted hundreds of thousands of lives. Seed's impact is rooted in its unique leveraging model that not only provides better care to patients, but also trains future generations, supports the health sector and catalyzes change in the health system.

Dr. Kerry’s work has been featured at conferences, in print, online and media including the Aspen Ideas Festival, the United Nations, the World Health Assembly, NPR, PBS, MSNBC and Marie Claire, the New England Journal of Medicine, the New York Times and The Lancet.

She graduated from Yale University and Harvard Medical School, completing her clinical training at Massachusetts General Hospital. She earned her Master’s in Health Policy, Planning, and Financing from the London Schools of Economics and of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She is currently a critical care physician at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and serves as the Associate Director of Partnerships and Global Initiatives at MGH Global Health. She directs the Global Public Policy and Social Change program at Harvard Medical School where she has focused on links between security and health. She is a Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation Social Entrepreneur, a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She as awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Public Policy from Northeastern University in 2015. She was recently appointed to the prestigious President’s Council for International Activities at Yale University, as a Global Advisor to the Wellbeing Foundation Africa. She is the mother of a six- and nine- year old.