Neema Kaseje

Neema Kaseje is an American pediatric surgeon and public health specialist in Boston, with Doctors Without Borders, and at University Hospitals Geneva. She is the founder and director of the Surgical Systems Research Group in Kisumu, Kenya. She has recently been appointed the head of the World Health Program in Emergency and Essential Surgical Care, and leads a Wellcome Trust funded COVID-19 health intervention in Siaya, Kenya.

Early life and education Neema Kaseje earned her Bachelor of Arts in Biology in 1999 from Boston University and her MD from Boston University School of Medicine in 2004. She received a master's degree in Public Health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 2008. In 2018, she received a Doctorate in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Kaseje started her medical career as a resident at the Boston Medical Center. She has been a Clinic Fellow at the Harvard Medical School Program in Global Surgery and Social Change in Boston and Haiti.

She was born in Boston and raised in Geneva, Switzerland and Kisumu, Kenya. She describes herself as always drawn to science. Her father is also a public health specialist who spent worked extensively in community based health, and this has influenced her work. She leads the strategic support for a UBS Optimus funded project that aims to increase access to surgery in rural Nicaragua. Her organization has built a network of mentorship groups that reach 800 young girls in Siaya to encourage school retention and reduce teenage pregnancies during the pandemic. She is actively involved in the Global Initiative for Children's Surgery.

Recently, Kaseje has headed a hackathon with people under 30 from Africa with the intention of attracting and developing technological solutions to surgical problems.

Kaseje was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2017 and the NaWuchs Prize by the Swiss Society for Pediatric Surgery.