Prof. Brook K. Baker

Professor Baker teaches disability discrimination law, negotiations and a new course on human rights, intellectual property, and access to medicines. He taught and consulted in South African law schools and law school clinics between 1997-2012. Professor Baker is an honorary research fellow at the University of KwaZulu Natal in Durban, South Africa.

Professor Baker is also a senior policy analyst for Health GAP (Global Access Project) and is actively engaged in campaigns for universal access to treatment, prevention, and care for people living with HIV/AIDS, especially expanded and improved medical treatment. More recently he has been working on accelerating research on and equitable global access to vaccines, medicines, and diagnostics to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. He has written and consulted extensively on intellectual property rights, trade, investor-state dispute settlement, access to medicines, and medicines regulatory policy, including with the African Union, NEPAD, South Africa, Uganda, ASEAN, Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil, Venezuela, CARICOM, UK DfID, the World Health Organization, the Millennium Development Goals Project, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, Open Society Institute, UNAIDS, UNDP, Unitaid, the Medicines Patent Pool, the Global Commission on HIV and the Law and others. He has served as a key, alternative board member and board member of the NGO delegation to Unitaid, which acts to improve market dynamics and early market entry of medicines and diagnostics needed to address HIV/AIDS, TB, Hepatitis C and malaria. He presently is a civil society representative to the Therapeutics Pillar of the Access to COVID-19 Tools Acclerator.

Professor Baker also works on policy issues concerning the Global Fund and the US PEPFAR Program, and how those priority disease initiatives might contribute more broadly to improving health care delivery in developing countries. Finally, he analyzes resource needs for global health, innovative financing mechanisms and IMF macroeconomic policies that restrict increased government and donor spending on health and education in developing countries.