Igor Rudan is a Professor at the University of Edinburgh and Chair in International Health and Molecular Medicine. He is the Joint Director of the Centre for Global Health Research and the WHO Collaborating Centre at the Usher Institute at the University of Edinburgh, UK.
He graduated from the University of Zagreb Medical School, Croatia, in 1995. He obtained two Masters Degrees and two Ph.D. degrees - in Anthropology (1997), Epidemiology (1999); Public Health (1998), and Genetic Epidemiology (2005).
He published more than 530 research papers and 10 books/monographs, which have received more than 140,000 citations to date. In 2007, he was the researcher with the greatest increase in the number of citations in the world within his field, according to the ISI/Thomson Reuters, and later included in the ISI/Thomson Reuters “World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds / Highly Cited Researchers” (2015–2020).
He has led 29 research grants totaling more than GBP 30 million. He founded the Croatian Biobank “10001 Dalmatians” (in 2001) in isolated populations of Croatian islands in Dalmatia region, which contributed to the discovery of the biomedical role for more than 2,000 human genes to date.
In his international health efforts to reduce global child mortality, he served as a consultant of the World Health Organization, UNICEF, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The World Bank, Save the Children, and others. He developed the “CHNRI” methodology (in 2007) and EQUIST tool (in 2012) that have been widely used by international agencies to prioritise investments in global health research and development.
He founded or co-founded Croatian Centre for Global Health at the University of Split, Croatia (2008), Edinburgh University Global Health Society (2011), “Journal of Global Health” (2011; co-Editor-in-Chief), WHO’s Collaborating Centre for Population Health Research, and Training in Edinburgh (2013), Centre for Global Health at the Usher Institute (2015) and the International Society of Global Health (2019).
He has been awarded >30 national and international research awards and professional recognitions, including Wellcome Trust’s International Research Development Award (2002), “Scientist of the Year” Award from The Croatian Parliament (2005), Visiting Professorship for Senior International Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2012), Chancellor’s Award for Research (2012) and Principal’s Medal for Outstanding service from The University of Edinburgh (2019). In 2016, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE).
He was listed among “Croatian Persons of the Year” by all three major Croatian newspapers in 2016. In 2017 he completed a documentary series “Survival: The Story of Global Health” which was broadcasted at the Croatian National TV and seen by more than 1 million people cumulatively, and nearly 100,000 on YouTube. He published four №1 national bestsellers in Croatia in popular science: “The Exact Colour of the Sky” (2017), “Evil Air” (2018), “In the Land of Clans”(2019), and “Awaiting the Fires” (2020). He is both a Croatian and a British citizen.
(For a more detailed biography, please use a link to Igor Rudan’s Wikipedia page).