High-flier who wrote book with Chelsea Clinton

DEVI Sridhar was born in Florida and took her first steps as an academic when she earned a degree in biology at the age of 18.

A Rhodes Scholarship brought her to Oxford University in 2006, where she completed her Masters – studying malnutrition in India – and then a doctorate.

She credits reading Pathologies Of Power by American anthropologist Paul Farmer as a turning point in her career by showing her that health and politics are inseparable.

Professor Sridhar arrived at Edinburgh in 2014, aged 30, to take up a full professorship and become the founding director of the Global Health Governance Programme.

She co-wrote with Chelsea Clinton Governing Global Health: Who Runs The World And Why, which examined how governments and agencies respond to disease outbreaks.

Part of the 18-strong Scottish Government Covid-19 Advisory Group, her role in helping shape the response to the virus has been an opportunity to put some of her ideas into practice. Her criticism of the UK Government led politicians, including Tory MSP Murdo Fraser – convenor of Holyrood’s Covid-19 committee – to question her impartiality.

She responded by labelling their comments ‘cheap… bizarre and sad’ before launching her tirade against Unionists, for which she later had to apologise.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has branded suggestions that Professor Sridhar’s advice is designed to meet the aims of the SNP as ‘utterly disgraceful’.