Senior Research Fellow
Chatham House’s Global Health Programme

Emma Ross is the Senior Research Fellow in Chatham House’s Global Health Programme, where she leads the Institute’s health security portfolio.

Her research has focused on infectious disease control, including leading a weekly virtual expert panel discussion series on the COVID-19 pandemic; assessing global solidarity in responding to the pandemic; evaluating the approach to command & control of the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone, considerations for building sustainable laboratories in Africa and options for strengthening transnational public health data sharing for greater health security.
She has also been for more than a decade the Managing Editor of the Control of Communicable Diseases Manual (CCDM), a leading reference book on infectious diseases for public health specialists and epidemiologists that is updated on a rolling basis.

Prior to working at Chatham House, she headed news operations at the World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva, after serving as a long-time medical correspondent at the Associated Press, for whom she reported from the frontlines of many of the major international health stories coming out of Europe, Africa and Asia – from outbreaks, global health challenges and debates in public health policy and medical ethics to advances in science and medicine.
She has a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University in the United States.