Patricia Geli is Senior Economist/Public Health Specialist in the Africa Region of the World Bank. As Task Team Leader for the Africa CDC Regional Investment Financing Project, she led the design and appraisal of this project which aims to strengthen continental, regional and national infectious disease detection and response systems.
As a member of the Bank’s COVID-19 Task Force, she supported the coordination for the response and peer reviewed many COVID-19 emergency operations in diverse regions.
At the height of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, Patricia went on an extended mission to Sierra Leone during the implementation of the Bank's emergency response program.
Prior to that, she was Country Economist for the Central African Republic, The Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau, where she led Development Policy Financing operations and several pieces of rigorous analytical work. In the World Bank’s Operations Policy and Country Services, she coordinated the Country Policy and Institutional Assessments, the bedrock of IDA replenishment.
Prior to joining the Bank, Patricia worked for seven years at the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control and the Swedish strategic program against antibiotic resistance (Strama). She worked on AMR issues for the World Health Organization in Geneva, and on the Gates-funded Global Antibiotic Resistance Partnership in Washington, D.C.
Patricia has led and co-authored work on the subjects of aid effectiveness; debt sustainability; economic growth and stability; fragility, conflict and violence; and poverty and inequality. She has published extensively in refereed journals on the topics of epidemics, antimicrobial resistance, public health, clinical and randomized controlled trials, pharmacological trials.
Patricia received her MSc, MPhil and PhD at Stockholm University and advanced training at Karolinska Institute and Harvard School of Public Health. She completed post-doctoral studies in Economics at Resources for the Future, a Washington DC-based think tank. She was a visiting fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health and research associate at Princeton University's Health Grand Challenge.