Professor Athula Sumathipala, Director of the Institute for Research and Development in Health and Social Care in Sri Lanka, and the current Secretary General and President-elect (2026–2027), has been invited to attend the Global Forum on Bioethics in Research (GFBR) meeting on 18–19 November 2025 in Accra, Ghana.
The theme of the meeting is “Reimagining research partnerships: equity, power and resilience.” It is organised by the GFBR at the World Health Organization (WHO) and supported by leading international research funders, including Wellcome (UK), the UK Medical Research Council, the US National Institutes of Health, and the South African Medical Research Council. The WHO Ghana Country Office and the University of Ghana will serve as local co-hosts.
A central goal of this year’s GFBR is to move beyond identifying inequities or injustices in research partnerships. Instead, the focus will be on developing solutions that are ethically sound, practically implementable, and capable of reimagining how research partnerships are defined and practiced globally. The programme will include keynote lectures, case study discussions, and opportunities for networking, with an emphasis on drawing from real-world experiences in health research collaborations.
Professor Sumathipala is an internationally recognised expert in bioethics, mental health, and twin research, with over 25 years of leadership in global health. He holds Emeritus Professorships at King’s College London and Keele University, UK, and has made significant contributions to international ethics forums. His roles have included membership in the WHO Working Group on Ethical Issues during Epidemics and advisory positions with the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and the Centre for Biomedical Ethics in Singapore. He has also been a featured speaker at numerous conferences across Europe, South Asia, and Africa.
His longstanding involvement with GFBR includes serving on the Planning Committee for the 2018 meeting in Cape Town (“Ethics of data sharing and biobanking in health research”), where he also acted as an advisor for the Wellcome Collection, contributing to six resulting papers. He has participated in several past GFBR meetings, including Cape Town (2002), Brasilia (2002), Malawi (2005), and Karachi (2006).
Article – https://www.dailymirror.lk/…/Lankan…/239-323868
