User Profile

Professor of the Practice, Dept. of Intl. Health; Director, IDEA Initiative, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Anthony D. So, MD, MPA, is the second Professor of the Practice and Founding Director of the Innovation+Design Enabling Access (IDEA) Initiative at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Based in Health Systems in the Department of International Health, the IDEA Initiative fosters innovation and design of new technologies for greater health access and impact. He also serves as thematic director of the Transformative Technologies and Institutions arm of the Johns Hopkins Alliance for a Healthier World. As Director of the Strategic Policy Program of ReAct--Action on Antibiotic Resistance, he works with a global network dedicated to meeting the challenge of antimicrobial resistance, and his program serves as the Secretariat to the Antibiotic Resistance Coalition. Previously, Dr. So has served as the Director of the Duke Program on Global Health and Technology Access, as Associate Director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Health Equity Program, and as Senior Advisor to the Administrator of the U.S. Agency for Health Care Policy and Research. He was named a White House Fellow during the Clinton Administration and subsequently received the HHS Secretary’s Distinguished Service Award for shepherding the Liaison Office for Quality in support of the President’s Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry and the Consumer Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. He has served on a wide range of advisory groups, including the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Accelerating Rare Diseases Research and Orphan Product Development, the National Academy of Science’s Committee on the Illicit Tobacco Market, a WHO expert working group on fostering innovation to combat antimicrobial resistance, the Antibiotic Resistance Working Group of the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors in Science and Technology, the Expert Advisory Group of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines, and the Expert Commission on Addressing the Livestock Contribution to the Antibiotic Resistance Crisis. He has also contributed to the Lancet Infectious Diseases Commission on Antibiotic Resistance, co-edited the Chatham House’s Working Group’s report, Towards a New Global Business Model for Antibiotics: Delinking Revenues from Sales, and co-authored “A Framework for Costing the Lowering of Antimicrobial Use in Food Animal Production” for the UK Review on Antimicrobial Resistance. He recently completed service as Co-Convener of the UN Interagency Coordination Group on Antimicrobial Resistance that presented recommendations to the UN Secretary General in April 2019. Dr. So received his BA in philosophy and biomedical sciences and his MD in a six-year program at the University of Michigan. He earned his MPA from Princeton University as a Woodrow Wilson Scholar. Dr. So completed his residency in internal medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and his fellowship in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at the University of California, San Francisco/ Stanford. He currently serves on the Boards of two of the nation’s most prominent consumer and healthcare groups, Public Citizen and Community Catalyst.