Till Bärnighausen

Dr. Till Bärnighausen is Alexander von Humboldt Professor and Director of the Institute of Public Health at the University of Heidelberg. He is also an adjunct professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a faculty at the Wellcome Trust Africa Health Research Institute in South Africa. Till works on health system access and transformation, and the causal impacts of HIV treatment and other global health priority interventions on population health, economic, social and behavioral outcomes. Till and his team have established the population impact of ‘real-world’ HIV treatment on mortality, employment and food security. They have also shown that in a rural Southern African community with high HIV prevalence and incidence neither sexual partner concurrency nor large age gaps between young girls and their male partners are important drivers of the HIV epidemic. Finally, Till has introduced several methods innovations for applied, population-based HIV research: new approaches to estimate HIV incidence; Heckman selection models for HIV prevalence estimation; regression discontinuity for causal inference in clinical cohorts; and novel approaches to use geographical information system data to determine distance and exposures. Till is PI of four NIH R01 grants, and he is also the PI of five large-scale health systems trials to establish the impact of alternative approaches to deliver HIV care in sub-Saharan Africa on health and health systems outcomes (funded by NIH, Elton John AIDS Foundation, the European Commission, and 3ie). Till has published more than 200 peer-reviewed articles, including in Science, PNAS, Lancet and PLOS Medicine. He is a medical specialist in Family Medicine and holds doctoral degrees in Population and International Health Economics (Harvard) and History of Medicine (University of Heidelberg), as well as master degrees in Health Systems Management (LSHTM) and Financial Economics (SOAS). He previously worked as physician in Germany, China, and South Africa; as journalist in Berlin; and as management consultant for McKinsey & Company in Europe.