17 Facts About Joanne Liu

Joanne Liu was elected president during MSF's International General Assembly in June 2013.

Joanne Liu was born on 4 November 1965, Quebec City, Quebec, Canada, to a Chinese immigrant family from Toishan, Guangdong.

Joanne Liu's family ran a Chinese restaurant called China Garden.

Dr Joanne Liu was the fifth child after David, a child stillborn, Anthony, and Margaret.

Joanne Liu dreamed of becoming "a doctor without borders" one day.

Joanne Liu then completed a sub-specialty in pediatric emergency care at Bellevue Hospital Center of the New York University School of Medicine and an International Master's in Health Leadership degree at the McGill University Desautels Faculty of Management.

Joanne Liu started her career with Medecins sans Frontieres, in 1996 when she worked with Malian refugees in Mauritania.

From 1999 to 2002, Joanne Liu was a programs manager at the Paris office of MSF.

Joanne Liu then went on to work as the president of the board of directors of MSF in Canada between 2004 and 2009.

Joanne Liu has helped to create and currently co-manages the organization's telemedicine project, which connects MSF physicians in 150 remote sites with a platform of over 300 medical specialists across the globe.

From 2002 to 2013, Joanne Liu served as a full-time Pediatric Emergency Physician at Ste-Justine Hospital in Montreal and at the Health Travel Clinic of the Centre hospitalier de l'Universite de Montreal.

Joanne Liu is an associate professor at the Universite de Montreal.

From 2013 to 2019, Joanne Liu served as International President of Medecins Sans Frontieres, in Geneva.

On 2 September 2014, Joanne Liu gave a briefing to the United Nations General Assembly, urging member states to mobilize against the Ebola epidemic in West Africa.

On 7 October 2015, Joanne Liu demanded an independent investigation of the American bombing of the MSF hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan.

Joanne Liu denounced the bombing and suggested that it was a war crime.

From 2020 until 2021, Joanne Liu served as a member of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, an independent group examining how the World Health Organization and countries handled the COVID-19 pandemic, co-chaired by Helen Clark and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.