Dr. Felicia Marie Knaul, the associate of the chancellor at UCLA, is internationally recognized for her transformative and translational research in global health, health systems and health economics, focused on reducing inequities. She is also a distinguished professor of medicine and serves as a senior advisor to the dean of UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, as well as a senior advisor to the president of UCLA Health and a member of the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Her work has influenced policy and improved the condition of at-risk populations in low and middle-income countries, particularly in Latin America. She founded a Mexican civil society organization; spearheaded multiple global networks of researchers, higher education leaders, advocacy organizations, policymakers, and multi-sectoral policy initiatives; and has authored some 350 academic and policy publications.
A woman who has lived through breast cancer, Dr. Knaul founded and serves as president of Tómatelo a Pecho, a Mexican non-profit agency originally focused on breast cancer which has now expanded its mandate to include women’s health and health system strengthening. Since its founding in 2008, the organization has trained thousands of primary care personnel using novel techniques. She chronicled her own cancer journey and those of other women in the books Tómatelo a Pecho and Beauty without the Breast.
Dr. Knaul’s wide-ranging research has focused on violence against women and children, access to pain relief and palliative care, cancer, health systems and reform, health financing, women and health, poverty and inequity, female labor force participation and at-risk children and youth.
She has put in place and led multiple global research networks. Dr. Knaul currently serves as the Co-Chair of the Lancet Commission on Gender-based Violence and Maltreatment of Young People, and The Lancet Commission on Cancer And Health Systems. From 2014 to 2017, she founded and co-chaired The Lancet Commission on Global Access to Palliative Care and Pain Relief and lead-authored the 2017 report Alleviating the access abyss in palliative care and pain relief – an imperative of universal health coverage. From 2012 to 2015, Dr. Knaul contributed to The Lancet Commission on Women and Health as a leading co-author, and more recently served on the Lancet Commissions on the Value of Death (2022) and Breast Cancer (2024). Dr. Knaul has also led a series of health policy papers in The Lancet spanning two decades of health reform in Mexico, most recently in 2023 covering the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and originating from The Lancet’s 2006 Mexico series, which she chaired. Dr. Knaul also played a leadership role in establishing the Covid-19 Latam Observatory, which brought together a group of researchers from eight Latin American countries to collect and analyze data on COVID-19 and sub-national policymaking.
Before coming to UCLA, Dr. Knaul served as director of the Institute for Advanced Study of the Americas and director of the Office of Hemispheric and Global Affairs at the University of Miami, and was a professor at the university’s Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine. Dr. Knaul previously served as director of the Harvard Global Equity Initiative and associate professor at the Harvard Medical School. In Mexico, she maintains an active research presence, leading a research team focusing on health equity and collaborating with the Mexican Health Foundation, the National Institute of Public Health and the Tecnológico de Monterrey.
She previously served in high-ranking posts in the Secretariat of Public Education and in the Secretariat of Social Development of Mexico and worked on the teams that designed and implemented the 2003 Mexican health reform (Seguro Popular) and the 1993 Colombian health reform. While serving in Mexico’s Ministry of Education, Dr. Knaul designed and implemented Sigamos Aprendiendo en el Hospital (Let’s Keep Learning in the Hospital), a groundbreaking national program that established officially recognized schools within tertiary hospitals across the country.
Dr. Knaul is an elected member of the Mexican National Academy of Medicine, inducted Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. She earned a master’s and Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, and her bachelor’s in international development from the University of Toronto.
She and her husband, Dr. Julio Frenk, have two children, Sofia Hannah and Mariana Havivah.
