SEATTLE -- The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced today two senior staff appointments in its
Global Health Program, naming Carol Dahl as Director of Staff and Chris Wilson as Interim Director of Discovery. Both of them will report directly to
Tachi Yamada, president of the Global Health Program. The appointments are effective March 22.
“Under Carol’s leadership, the Discovery team has successfully engaged the world’s scientists to identify new ideas, fill gaps in scientific knowledge, and work on solutions that could lead to breakthrough advances that will save lives,” said Yamada. “Since joining the foundation in August, Chris has brought new focus and direction to our work in vaccine discovery and human biology. I look forward to working closely with them in their new roles.”
Dahl and Wilson are assuming new roles after holding other positions at the foundation:
- Carol Dahl will become Director of Staff, working closely with Yamada to facilitate progress and performance against global health priorities across the Global Health Program; including partnering with the Global Health Strategy team to shape the foundation’s overall global health strategy. Dahl was previously Director of Discovery for the Global Health Program.
Prior to joining the Gates Foundation as Director of Global Health Technologies in 2003, Dahl served as Vice President for Strategic Partnerships at Biospect Inc (now Pathworks Diagnostics). From 1990 to 2001, Dahl worked at the U.S. National Institutes of Health in several capacities, including founding Director of the Office of Technology and Industrial Relations at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and Program Director at the National Center for Human Genome Research. Dahl received a bachelor's degree from the University of Iowa and master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received postdoctoral training at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and the Immunobiology Research Center at the University of Minnesota, and served on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh Cancer Institute.
- Chris Wilson will become Interim Director of Discovery during this transition. Wilson joined the foundation in 2009 as Deputy Director, Vaccine Discovery and Human Biology, Discovery.
Wilson is a pediatrician and immunologist, and received his training at University of California, Los Angeles, Harvard, and Stanford. He joined the faculty at the University of Washington in 1979 in the Infectious Diseases Division of the Department of Pediatrics and later served as head of the Division of Infectious Diseases, Immunology and Rheumatology. In 1989, he became one of the founding faculty members in the new Department of Immunology, and served as Chairman of the Department of Immunology and head of the graduate program in immunology from 1999 to 2009.