Leadership Team

Dr. Kern most recently served as Executive Director of Global Health Labs, a Gates Ventures initiative that develops diagnostic and healthcare technologies for low- and middle-income countries and advances strategic priorities of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation across areas such as reproductive, maternal and child health, and primary care technologies.

Prior to this role, he spent nearly a decade as Deputy Director of Quantitative Sciences at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he led teams focused on data analysis to support therapeutic program strategies across multiple global health areas, including maternal and child health, family planning, malaria, tuberculosis, neglected tropical diseases, HIV, and pandemic preparedness. His group advocated for making research data “always FAIR and sometimes OPEN” to maximize the impact of data beyond the original questions it was collected to address.

Earlier in his career, Dr. Kern served as Global Head of Pharmacology Modeling at Novartis Pharma AG in Basel, Switzerland, where he led teams providing model-based drug development support across multiple therapeutic areas and stages of development.

He began his career in academia at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, where he spent nearly 15 years as Associate Professor of Pharmaceutics, Anesthesiology, and Bioengineering and served as co-investigator for the NIH-funded Pediatric Pharmacology Research Unit. During this time, he designed and led clinical pharmacology studies spanning populations from preterm infants to elderly adults.