Christine Stabell Benn

Christine, MD, PhD, DMSc, MAE, has worked at the Health and Demographic Surveillance System (HDSS) site Bandim Health Project in Guinea-Bissau (www.bandim.org) since 1993.

Dr. Benn holds a position as a Professor of Global Health at the University of Southern Denmark. She is also a Chair at the Danish Institute for Advanced Study. Dr. Benn’s research focuses on health interventions and their effect on overall health in real life. Vaccines and vitamins affect overall health to a much larger extent than explained by their well- known specific effects; they also have so-called “non-specific effects”. These effects are often sex- differential, and they may affect each other, making the sequence and combination of health interventions more important than usually thought.

Dr. Benn has taken the observations on non-specific effects forward to randomised controlled trials testing the effects of vitamin A supplementation, BCG, oral polio, and measles vaccine on overall health, not just the targeted condition(s). She also tested whether non-specific effects of vaccines are important in high-income settings. Furthermore, she explored the biological mechanisms underlying the non-specific effects. The results have been shared in >360 scientific articles. Dr. Benn has been a technical advisor for the WHO on neonatal vitamin A supplementation and a member of the WHO’s working group on non-specific effects of vaccines, and she served on the scientific committee of the EDCTP for many years.