Alanna Shaikh Keynote Speaker

Alanna Shaikh is a global health consultant who specializes in individual, organizational and systemic resilience. She is the Principal Consultant of Tomorrow Global.

Throughout her career,  she has worked closely with high-level government officials and development donors.   She is also a TED Senior Fellow where she heads the TED Fellows Coaching and Mentoring Initiative.   Her March 2020 TEDx talk ‘ Coronavirus is our Future​’ attracted more than 20 million views so far, via various platforms.   She spoke at TED Global in 2012 on Alzheimer’s, this talk has had close to 2 million views.  In recent months, she has given a series of virtual guest lectures to staff of the prestigious CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) in Atlanta.

Alanna has more than twenty years of program design, management, and assessment experience spanning the humanitarian relief and development sectors. She is particularly adept at navigating the complex relationships between local governments, implementing organizations, and bilateral funding agencies, and at communicating the corresponding implications in an accessible manner for wider audiences, including writing for UN Dispatch as well as providing social media support to NGOs.   She has worked for the US State Department, USAID, Abt Associates, Project HOPE and International Medical Corps.  She has lived in seven countries and is multilingual.

Recent publications include a major article article on global health security in the Daily Telegraph newspaper in 2018 entitled ‘Beware ‘Disease X’: the mystery killer keeping scientists awake at night‘ and an essay in the Annual Review of Comparative and International Education. She also writes on coaching and personal resilience at www.thisworldneedsbrave.com

Alanna has a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University and a Master’s degree in Public Health from Boston University.

She is the author of “What’s Killing Us: A Practical Guide to Understanding Our Biggest Global Health Problems.”  In this book, she lays out the most important challenges and issues in global wellness – from tuberculosis to HIV/AIDS, flu, maternal mortality, and the diminishing effectiveness of antibiotics – while untangling the web of jargon that so often permeate those discussions.

Speaking Topics Include

• How life will change as a result of COVID: the new normal will not be the old normal
• What the next pandemic will look like
• How do we live through a global disaster and come out stronger? Lessons from Ebola and other past pandemics
• Why vaccination is important
• Personal resilience in times of crisis: lessons I’ve learned from the poorest people in the world
• What we can learn from natural disasters