Biography
Katherine Pineo is an PhD researcher in Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London and a Rotary Global Grant Scholar. Her work focuses on global health governance, global health security, and international health policy, with particular interest in how history and power shape the systems through which global health threats are governed.
Alongside her doctoral research, Katherine has worked as a Research Assistant at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and as a Module Coordinator at the King’s Global Health Institute, supporting research and teaching in global health. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, where she gained experience in institutional fundraising, grant development, and health advocacy.
Katherine holds an MSc in Global Health, Social Justice, and Public Policy from King’s College London and a BA in English Literature and American Studies from Providence College.
Her broader academic interests include global health governance, global health security, pandemic preparedness, international health law, colonialism and global health, and the relationship between history, power, and equity in international policymaking. Her work seeks to contribute to a more historically informed understanding of global health governance and to inform conversations about how international health systems can become more equitable, accountable, and responsive.
Research
Thesis title: 'From Plague to Pandemic: The International Health Regulations & the Persistence of Colonialism in Global Health'
This thesis undertakes a longitudinal historical and discourse-analytic study of the International Health Regulations (IHR) and their precursor regimes from 1851 to 2024, examining how the international sanitary order constructs, reproduces, and challenges the colonial logics through which global health governance has been articulated.
Using critical discourse analysis and a genealogical approach, the research traces how meanings attached to disease, mobility, sovereignty, trust, responsibility, and global health threats have emerged and shifted across the International Sanitary Conferences, the International Sanitary Regulations, and successive iterations of the IHR.
Through systematic analysis of this 170-year documentary archive, the thesis investigates how colonial discursive formations persist and are continually reworked within the IHR. It approaches the Regulations not simply as a neutral legal or technical framework, but as an evolving site of meaning-making and negotiation shaped by historical power relations.
By placing contemporary global health governance within this longer historical lineage, the research explores how colonial legacies continue to influence understandings of global health threats, responsibility, sovereignty, and hierarchy. It ultimately asks what this history reveals about the assumptions and power structures underpinning contemporary pandemic preparedness and global health security.
PhD supervision
- Principal supervisor: Dr Mark Eccleston-Turner
- Secondary supervisor: Dr Rishita Nandagiri