Photo: Damien Marti/SNIS

Dr. Sara L.M. Davis (known as Meg) is Professor, Digital Health and Rights at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick; and principal investigator of the Digital Health and Rights Project, a four-country participatory action research project led by a consortium of social scientists, human rights lawyers, health advocates, and networks of people living with HIV.  Her work focuses on human rights, data and digital governance in global health. Her latest book is The Uncounted: Politics of data in global health (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Meg began her career working in China, earning a Ph.D. at University of Pennsylvania, and holding postdoctoral fellowships at Yale and UCLA. Her first book, Song and silence: Ethnic revival on China’s southwest borders (Columbia University Press 2005) drew on ethnographic research with ethnic Buddhist monks, storytellers and pop singers in Yunnan, China and in Shan State, Myanmar. She taught at Penn, and held postdoctoral fellowships at Yale University and UCLA. In 2002, Meg joined Human Rights Watch as a researcher on China, then founded and served as executive director of Asia Catalyst.

In 2013-15 she was the first senior advisor on human rights at the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, leading development of the Global Fund’s technical guidance on human rights in HIV and TB, its first key performance indicator on human rights, its first policy on not funding torture or compulsory treatment, and its first minimum human rights standards for grant agreements; as well as leading development of the first technical assistance fund for community, rights and gender in the New Funding Model. She also led training of the Office of Inspector General fraud and corruption investigators in human rights investigations. Throughout her career as a practitioner, she maintained an active involvement in academic life with teaching and visiting fellowships at Temple University, University of Alabama at Birmingham, the Geneva Centre for Humanitarian Studies, Columbia University, Fordham University School of Law, and New York University’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. As a consultant, she assisted UN agencies, civil society networks, and delegations on the Board of the Global Fund and UNAIDS, with strategy, policy, and research. She led development of the first strategy for the Global Health Centre of the Geneva Graduate Institute in 2019-2020.

In 2019, Meg co-founded the Digital Rights Advisory Group (DRAG), later the Digital Health and Rights Project (DHRP), with collaborators at GNP+, KELIN and STOPAIDS, and support from Fondation Botnar. She joined the University of Warwick in 2023, bringing DHRP to Warwick, where it grew with major grants and new collaborators.

Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, Meg launched the Right On Podcast to invite leading human rights experts to reflect on the issues raised in the Covid response. She is an expert listed on SheSource. In 2017, she was one of three winners of the International Geneva Award.

Meg is an avid trail runner, aspiring novelist, coffee drinker and live jazz fan, and lives in London.