Elizabeth Pisani
journalist, epidemiologist; public health consultant
Elizabeth Pisani (born 1964) is a British-American epidemiologist, public health consultant, author and journalist. She is an academic researcher and the director of Ternyata Ltd., a public health consultancy based in London, UK. Her research investigates the ways in which politics, economics and culture influence public health. This has included markets for substandard and falsified medicines and HIV. Before this, Pisani was a journalist who worked as a correspondent for Reuters in several Asian countries.
Her first book The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS, which examines factors influencing decision-making for HIV prevention, was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2009. Pisani is also known for her 2014 travel book Indonesia Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation, in addition to other writings on the society and politics of Indonesia.
Pisani holds (or has held) visiting or honorary posts at Universitas Pancasila Jakarta (Professor); the George Institute for Global Health (Professorial Fellow); London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (Honorary Associate Professor); the Policy Institute, King's College London (Senior Research Fellow); Imperial College London (Reader); and the School of Health Policy and Management at Erasmus University Rotterdam (Associate Professor).
Education
She was born in the United States and educated in several European countries. She graduated from Oxford University with an MA in classical Chinese in 1986. After working as a journalist for many years, Pisani changed professional course, taking an MSc in Medical Demography and later a PhD in Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
Journalism career
After her first degree, Pisani joined Reuters as a foreign correspondent, working in Hong Kong, India and Indonesia.
The public source identifies “Elizabeth Pisani” as journalist, epidemiologist; public health consultant. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Elizabeth, Pisani and journalist.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5363352. VIAF identifies the subject as 43076431. The Library of Congress control number is n00124281. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1964, 2009, 2014 and 1986.
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This entry incorporates text from “Elizabeth Pisani” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.