Lady Mireille Gillings renews generous Fellowship funding that supports public health researchers to develop leadership skills for real-world impact
Launched on 3 March through the Institut Pasteur and Pasteur Foundation, the 2026 Lady Mireille & Sir Dennis Gillings Global Public Health Fellowship is a distinguished two-year postdoctoral programme based at Institut Pasteur in Paris.
“Future leaders in public health must have skills across what I call the 3Ms: Money, Management and Medicine. The fellowships are designed to build business skills on top of scientific training, which is critical for the next generation of global scientists.”
Lady Mireille Gillings, PhD, Hon DSc
Established through the philanthropy of Lady Mireille Gillings, the Fellowship is designed to cultivate a new generation of global health leaders who combine scientific excellence with strategic leadership, financial acumen, and real-world implementation skills.
The programme is exclusively open to recent PhD graduates from three institutions: the University of Cambridge, the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health, and Concordia University in Montreal. Fellows will conduct cutting-edge research within leading laboratories at Institut Pasteur while also receiving structured exposure to leadership development, health economics, and global health strategy.
The programme is the vision of Lady Mireille, scientist, businesswoman and entrepreneur with over 25 years’ experience in the biotech sector, who has long believed that scientific brilliance alone is not enough to create the real-world impacts needed to improve global public health. Practitioners must also possess leadership skills and be able to navigate policy, finance and implementation, locally, nationally and internationally. Alongside their research in the laboratory, Fellows therefore attend training in the wider business and entrepreneurial context of their research and build networks for international collaboration.
Lady Mireille Gillings, PhD, Hon DSc, said: “Future leaders in public health must have skills across what I call the 3Ms: Money, Management and Medicine. The fellowships are designed to build business skills on top of scientific training, which is critical for the next generation of global scientists.”
The Fellowship programme, begun in 2015 and repeated in 2023, proved a huge success; all of the collaborating institutions are delighted that their partnership can continue so that further Fellows will be supported and trained under this generous renewal of funding.
The Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge, Patrick Maxwell, said:
"These fellowships exemplify a bold, timely approach to developing the next generation of global public health leaders. Combining scientific excellence with leadership, financial insight and entrepreneurial thinking at a formative career stage, they have the potential to reshape clinical practice and health systems worldwide, with lasting benefit for millions of patients and their families."
Previous Fellowship recipient Dr Jingwen Fan graduated from the University of Cambridge with a PhD in 2023 and completed two years working on tuberculosis (TB) at the Institut Pasteur in December 2025.
With her long-term passion for studying genetics and immunology, Jingwen was poised to exploit new big-data and machine learning techniques for understanding the variation between individuals in their response to TB infection and treatment, yielding information on how specific variants of chemicals in the immune response called cytokines, isolated from blood samples, could be correlated with disease severity. Identifying these cytokines as biomarkers that distinguish active from non-active infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis will help patient stratification, treatment monitoring, and vaccine evaluation.
Meanwhile she took online courses offered through Stanford (Health Innovation Program) to help her to navigate the digital transformation in healthcare, design impactful clinical studies, and critically assess data for informed decision making, and through MIT Sloan School of Management (Artificial Intelligence in Pharma and Biotech) to enrich her strategic knowledge of machine learning/AI tools and their practical applications in early stages of drug discovery, identifying molecules, designing clinical trials, and selling pharmaceuticals.
Jingwen says: “My research requires bridging academia, clinical research, and industry through interdisciplinary collaborations. The Gillings Fellowship has enabled me to pursue these very interdisciplinary and translational research ambitions. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Lady Mireille for establishing this Fellowship and for empowering me with not only scientific expertise, but also the broader perspective needed to address complex public health challenges.”
Jingwen’s research has been so successful that she now continues to develop her projects as a postdoctoral researcher at the Pasteur Institut with funding from Pasteur-Hong Kong University.
Dr Yasmine Belkaïd, President of Institut Pasteur, said: “This Fellowship is the embodiment of Lady Mireille’s extraordinary vision and trailblazing leadership. Through this program, we are investing in a generation capable of transforming discovery into global public health impact.”
Fellowship applications open on 3 March 2026.
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