Rifat Atun is Professor of International Health Management at Imperial College London. In September 2008, he moved to Geneva to take up his new position in the Executive Management Team of The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria as the Director of Strategy, Performance and Evaluation Cluster. He will be on extended leave from Imperial College during his tenure at the Global Fund.
At Imperial, Rifat founded and led the Centre for Health Management: a multidiciplinary research group involved in a number of international and UK based research programmes which used multimethods approaches to explore how contextual and health systems factors influence the adoption and diffusion of complex health innovations (for example communicable disease control programmes for tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, primary health care reforms, and novel technologies). Rifat is currently leading a multicountry study on health systems and communicable disease control involving the Global Fund, Harvard University, the World Health Organization, and the World Bank.
Rifat has worked extensively with the World Bank, World Health Organization, the UK Department for International Development, and has led research projects for a number of leading healthcare organizations such as Pfizer Inc., the Vodafone Group, Hofman La Roche, PA Consulting, and Tata Consulting Services. Rifat has advised a number of governments in Europe, Latin America, Central Asia and the Middle East.
Rifat was the Founding Director of the MSc in International Health Management, BSc in Management and Medical Science, and Founding Co-Director of the Masters in Public Health Programme at Imperial College. He was on the board of the Institute of Systems and Synthetic Biology at Imperial College. Rifat has founded and has been a director of a number of Imperial College spin out companies operating in areas of health informatics and biotechnology.
Rifat was member of the Strategic Technical Advisory Group of the World Health Organization for Tuberculosis and chaired the WHO Task Force on Health Systems and Tuberculosis Control. Between 2006-08 he was a Member of the Advisory Committee for WHO Research Centre for Health Development in Japan. He currently Chairs the STOP TB Partnership Coordinating Board and is a member of the MRC Global Health Group as the MRC Infections and Immunity Board representative.
He is a Fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners, Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health of the Royal College of Physicians, and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians UK.
