Oliver Johnson is a Senior Lecturer in Global Health & Health Systems Science and Director of King’s Global Health Partnerships, which works through long-term partnerships with health institutions in sub-Saharan Africa to strengthen health systems and improve care. He is a Senior Fellow at the Georgetown University Global Health Institute in Washington DC and Visiting Researcher at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He currently serves as a commissioner on both the Georgetown-Lancet Commission on Faith, Trust, and Health and the Lancet Commission on Health Systems Performance Assessment.

Oliver has an intercalated BSc in International Health from UCL and a medical degree and PhD from KCL. His doctoral research centred on strengthening leadership by health professionals in sub-Saharan Africa and his research interests are the health workforce, health leadership, and the political dynamics of health system strengthening.

He started his career as a Teaching Fellow in Global Health at KCL and the first Policy Director of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global Health in the UK Parliament. From 2013 to 2015, he was based in Freetown as the founding director of the King’s Global Health Partnership in Sierra Leone, a health systems strengthening programme embedded in the country’s Ministry of Health, main teaching hospital and medical school. He played a significant role in the country’s Ebola response, setting up Ebola care units, establishing coordination structures, and advising the Sierra Leone and UK governments. He was awarded an OBE for this work and later co-authored a book on the lessons from the Ebola outbreak: 'Getting to Zero: A Doctor and a Diplomat on the Ebola Frontline'.

In 2015 he moved to Johannesburg, South Africa, where he initially worked with Africa Health Placements, a South African non-profit that focused on the recruitment and retention of health workers in rural government hospitals and helped to establish a new Postgraduate Diploma in Rural Medicine at Stellenbosch University. After completing his PhD, he was recruited in 2023 to be the first Managing Director for the Global Health Institute at Georgetown University in the USA, working with the university’s leadership and senior faculty on global health strategy, establishing interdisciplinary research collaboratives, and running a global health student fellows programme. In 2025, he moved back to the UK to rejoin King’s College London.