Janet Diaz

Dr Janet Victoria Diaz is an accomplished specialist in intensive care and pulmonary medicine with strong expertise in clinical medicine, medical education, quality improvement and global health during health emergencies. She is committed to promoting the delivery of high-quality and cost-efficient acute and critical care to patients around the world during health emergencies from high-threat pathogens and other serious hazards. Since 2018, she has worked at the World Health Organization as Team Lead for the Clinical Management and Operations Unit of the Health Emergencies Programme. In this role, she leads the clinical management readiness and response to high-threat, infectious disease pathogens, including monkeypox, COVID-19 and Ebola virus disease, amongst others. She works to bring together global clinical experts into a more rapid, resilient and quality-focused outbreak response paradigm. The unit focuses on developing evidence-based clinical guidance and tools, accelerating clinical research and innovation on characterization and management by hosting the WHO clinical platform for emerging infectious diseases. The unit also provides clinical operational support to Member States, for example, the oxygen scale-up initiative and clinical capacity building interventions.. Her work has been successful in creating peer-to-peer knowledge exchange environments that promote open communication, experience-sharing and empower clinicians and health ministries. Prior to this, from 2010–2017, she worked as a part-time consultant for WHO, as the technical lead for the Severe Acute Respiratory Infection (SARI) Critical Care Training Project, a 3-day interactive critical care “short course”, which has trained over 2000 doctors around the world. Clinically, she has extensive clinical experience as a pulmonary critical care specialist, working for over 20 years in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, United States. Her work included being an intensivist at the California Pacific Medical Center, a tertiary referral centre, and at the Contra Costa regional hospital; Medical Director of the medical ICU at San Francisco General Hospital; and Assistant Clinical Professor at University of California San Francisco (UCSF). She completed her internal medicine residency and pulmonary and critical care fellowship at UCSF in 2006. In her spare time she travels around the world as an avid football fan and for her love of skiing!