Transforming the Global Health Architecture: From Crisis to Opportunity? with Kelley Lee
Local Time
- Timezone: America/New_York
- Date: Tuesday, October 20, 2026
- Time: 11:30 am - 1:00 pm
Location
- Hybrid
Global health is at a critical juncture. Geopolitical shifts, declining and increasingly uncertain funding, changing patterns of global interdependence, and declining public trust have placed unprecedented pressures on the institutions and arrangements through which countries cooperate to protect and improve health. Yet this disruption also creates an opportunity to ask a more fundamental question: rather than continuing to reform the existing system, should we rethink its architecture altogether?
In this special 90-minute event at the Dahdaleh Institute of Global Health, Professor Kelley Lee will explore the case for transforming the global health architecture. Drawing on her 2025 Wellcome Trust-commissioned paper, A Proposal for Transforming the Global Health Architecture, and referring to the ideas put forth by four other regional papers, she will begin by examining the historical evolution and current shortcomings of the global health system. The existing architecture, she argues, has developed in a largely ad hoc manner, resulting in fragmented institutions, overlapping mandates, insecure financing and governance arrangements that can struggle to respond to an increasingly interconnected world. The current disruption may therefore represent not simply a crisis, but a rare opportunity to go “back to the drawing board.”
This seminar is held in collaboration with the Global Strategy Lab and Graduate Program in Global Health, School of Global Health at York University.
In preparation for this seminar, Dr. Lee has recommended reading:
- Reforming global health for an age of mistrust, fragmentation and overlapping crises
- WHO: retirement or reinvention?
Recommended readings for all seminars can be found here.
Speaker Profile
Dr. Kelley Lee is trained in International Relations and Public Administration with a focus on international political economy. She spent over twenty years at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She was a core member of donor-led studies of WHO reform during the 1990s. She co-established the WHO Collaborating Centre on Global Change and Health, and chaired the WHO Resource Group on Globalization, Trade and Health. Dr Lee also co-led the Guildford Archiving Project to secure public access to internal tobacco industry documents, and then the Global Tobacco Control Research Programme to analyze their contents in relation to the globalization of the tobacco industry. Her research has been funded by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, Cancer Research UK, European Research Council, Health Canada, New Frontiers in Research Fund, Nuffield Trust, Rockefeller Foundation, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, UK Economic and Social Research Council, UN Population Fund, US National Institutes of Health, Wellcome Trust, Canadian Biomedical Research Fund, World Health Organization and several governments.
She has authored 140+ peer-reviewed papers, 70+ book chapters and 15 books including The World Health Organization (Routledge, 2009), Researching Corporations and Global Health Governance (Rowman and Littlefield International with Ben Hawkins, 2016) and the Oxford Handbook of Global Health Politics (OUP with Colin McInnes and Jeremy Youde, 2020). She joined the Faculty of Health Sciences in 2011 as Associate Dean, Research and Director of Global Health. She is a Fellow of the UK Faculty of Public Health, Royal College of Physicians, Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Register below and join us on Tuesday, October 20, at 11:30 a.m. ET
