Public Health Expert (Epidemiology) - WHO-SEARO

The World Health Organization was established in 1948 as a specialized agency of the United Nations that connects nations, partners and people to promote health, keep the world safe and serve the vulnerable – so everyone, everywhere can attain the highest level of health. WHO works with 194 Member States across 6 regions and on the ground in 150+ locations, the WHO team works to improve everyone’s ability to enjoy good health and well-being. WHO leads global efforts to expand universal health coverage. We direct and coordinate the world’s response to health emergencies. And we promote healthier lives – from pregnancy care through old age. Our Triple Billion targets outline an ambitious plan for the world to achieve good health for all using science-based policies and programmes. As one of the six WHO Regions, WHO South-East Asia is home to over a quarter of the world’s population. Committed to building a better, healthier future for the nearly two billion people in the Region, WHO is working with the 10 Member States (Bangladesh, Bhutan, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, India, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Timor-Leste) to address persisting and emerging epidemiological and demographic challenges. The WHO South-East Asia Regional office (SEARO) is based in New Delhi, India

The Health Promotion, Disease Prevention & Control (HDC) Department of WHO SEARO supports Member States in reducing morbidity and mortality from priority diseases and in strengthening surveillance systems that guide programme implementation. Within HDC, the Surveillance & Epidemiology Team integrates data across programmes, generates evidence, and develops analytical products that translate surveillance insights into action. The 2025–2026 reorganization has brought together a broader set of technical areas, enabling more coherent and integrated surveillance approaches. This strengthens the Region’s Multi Disease Elimination (MDE) agenda by promoting harmonized systems, improved cross programme coordination, and stronger evidence generation across communicable and noncommunicable diseases, mental health, environmental determinants, and other public health priorities. Member States continue to face evolving disease burdens, fragmented data streams, and growing needs for interoperable, high quality, and programmatically relevant surveillance. Strengthening surveillance is therefore critical for routine monitoring, gap identification, and more targeted disease control strategies. Wastewater and environmental surveillance (WES) has recently emerged as an important complementary data stream, offering early outbreak detection and community level pathogen monitoring, including in settings where clinical surveillance is limited. Through the EC HERA (European Commission Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority) –funded global initiative, WHO is developing normative guidance, multi pathogen tools, and capacity building approaches to support WES expansion. For SEARO, WES provides a strategic opportunity to advance the MDE agenda and strengthen interoperability across environmental, laboratory, and clinical surveillance. To support these priorities—including integration of WES into regional surveillance efforts—the UNV will contribute to evidence synthesis, donor engagement inputs, strategic communication, and analytical work supporting innovative, multi pathogen surveillance approaches. The UNV will also assist with development of regional and country surveillance products, coordination across technical units and Member States, and documentation of capacities and lessons learned. In addition, the UNV will support EC HERA–funded WES activities such as regional pathogen prioritization inputs, review of draft guidance, capacity building documentation, and synthesis of implementation experience relevant to SEARO’s integrated surveillance vision.

1) Support regional frameworks and integrated surveillance, including WES, under the MDE agenda (primary focus area) - Support development of a regional WES strategy under the EC HERA initiative, including coordination across technical units and alignment with the MDE agenda. - Contribute to a regional WES policy brief, including synthesis of evidence on use cases, cost effectiveness, and implications for multi pathogen surveillance. - Assist coordination with partners to harmonize approaches and consolidate regional feedback into global WES guidance and decision support tools. - Support organization of regional virtual/in person inception workshops to present WES aims, current workstreams, and introduce the decision support tool for pathogen prioritization. - Provide high level support to the development and rollout of the regional WES strategy, including broad contributions to pathogen prioritization, country engagement, integration within existing surveillance platforms, operational planning, sustainability and costing considerations, and facilitation of multisectoral collaboration. - Contribute to the finalization and implementation of the Regional Communicable Disease Surveillance Framework, including peer-reviewed publications, follow up actions, documentation, and preparation for technical discussions/consultations. - Support country specific surveillance action plan components aligned with the regional framework. - Assist exploratory work on integrated/cross programme surveillance relevant to MDE, including early scoping for alignment points across Communicable Diseases (CDs), Noncommunicable Diseases (NCDs), and mental health surveillance streams (not full integration yet; initial mapping/scoping). - Support collaboration with Health Information Systems/digital health teams on interoperability, data flows, validation and visualization (cross cutting digital surveillance work). 2) Partnerships, Communication & Visibility - Conduct donor landscape scans and maintain profiles of funding partners; track opportunities. - Draft and review concept notes, donor briefs, proposal inputs, and partner engagement materials aligned with surveillance priorities. - Contribute to resource mobilization materials and presentations to enhance visibility of Health Promotion, Disease Prevention and Control's (HDC’s) Surveillance & Epidemiology portfolio - Prepare communication/visibility materials (factsheets, briefs, web content, presentations, success stories). - Develop social media ready outputs and support updates to the Team’s/Department’s webpages, in close collaboration with the Youth Forum activities. 3) Evidence generation and strengthening pathogen confirmation for diseases not covered under dedicated programmes - Produce evidence products (e.g., burden reports, tools to facilitate data to action) for selected emerging or currently non reported diseases in SEAR (initial focus: chikungunya/zika, scrub typhus). - Conduct desk reviews; analyse available surveillance and laboratory data; summarize country practices, gaps and reporting challenges. - Consult with laboratories, One Health teams, WHO Health Emergencies Programme (WHE), HIS, and Country Office colleagues to understand diagnostic and surveillance bottlenecks. - Propose feasible options for strengthened indicator based surveillance, basic case detection models, and simple burden estimation approaches. - Contribute to the drafting of a pilot protocol for multiplex diagnostic tests at primary health care level to enhance pathogen confirmation, reduce reliance on syndromic surveillance, and improve overall indicator based surveillance quality. - Any other task assigned by the supervisor. 4) NCD and mental health surveillance and epidemiology - Support analytical work related to NCD surveillance systems, including reviewing Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) functionality, cause of death data availability, quality and reporting completeness. - Assist in developing/adapting tools and mapping and summarizing risk factor surveillance, identifying gaps in adult, adolescent and youth data coverage. - Support designing, compilation and synthesis of information on cancer registries and other NCD registries (e.g., diabetes, Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) events, stroke), including documentation of coverage, digitization and data quality challenges. - Contribute to reviews of patient level NCD data systems, including digitization status, interoperability and alignment with WHO’s NCD Facility Based Monitoring Guidance. - Support analysis and documentation of SEAHEARTS (https://www.who.int/southeastasia/activities/seahearts-for-accelerating-cvd-control) implementation across Member States, including digital hypertension/diabetes tracking systems. - Assist in early scoping of mental health surveillance, including mapping existing indicators, data sources and gaps. - Contribute to identifying opportunities for harmonizing NCDs including the risk factors and mental health indicators within broader, integrated surveillance efforts under the MDE umbrella. - Assist burden estimation exercises; support planning/review of longitudinal cohort studies and seroprevalence surveys (methods/tools, synthesis of findings).