Gauden Galea

Strategic Adviser to the Regional Director for Europe, Special Initiative on NCDs and Innovation

Dr Gauden Galea is a public health physician who has worked with WHO since 1998. Since March 2023, he has been working as Strategic Advisor to the Regional Director and heading the Special Initiative on Noncommunicable Diseases (NCDs) and Innovation. Between 2018 and 2023, he served as WHO Representative in China. In that role he coordinated the collaboration between WHO and China, with a primary focus on the COVID-19 response; led the review of a decade of health sector reform; and conducted advocacy for tobacco and alcohol control. Between 2011 and 2018 he directed the Division of Noncommunicable Diseases and Promoting Health through the Life-course at WHO/Europe. In the last three decades, he has contributed to the work on developing a national stepwise approach to NCDs, to the development of a process to link the prevention and control of NCDs to health systems, to the compilation of evidence linking NCDs to the global development agenda, to the renewal of life-course approaches to public health in the European Region, and to action plans on women’s health and men’s health in the Region. Dr Gauden Galea trained as a medical doctor at the University of Malta, and as a public health physician at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.