Meet the Team: Catherine Hennings

Catherine Hennings is interested in the details.

“Frankly, people don’t think a lot about the agreements that underpin the work that takes place in global health, especially in the scientific arena.”

Catherine and GHIAA director Julia Barnes-Weise, JD, CLP Barnes-Weise first met 10 years ago when Catherine was working at PATH , a global health NGO engaged in developing and delivering high-impact health solutions for communities facing the greatest health risks around the world, including vaccines. Julie had just started teaching at 美国杜克大学 .

Catherine was speaking about the implementation of global health partnerships at a workshop Julie attended. Afterwards, they bonded over a discussion of the details involved in partnership agreements and contracts. GHIAA was, at the time, an emerging research project following the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. PATH was working on a number of vaccine projects and partnerships with similar challenges, and? Catherine found the idea of compiling information on agreements exciting.

“For more than 40 years, PATH has worked in partnership with a wide variety of organizations, and we had a lot of experience figuring out how to structure these agreements and developing the agreement terms that would ensure our goal of global access to the products we were developing. Lots of other organizations didn’t know where to get started at all, which terms to include, or what global access necessarily meant.”

From 2014 to 2022, Catherine served as Director of Commercialization at PATH’s Center for Vaccine Innovation and Access after working as the Senior Commercialization Advisor from 2008 to 2014. She holds graduate degrees in science and business from Duke University and the University of Washington, respectively.

Catherine describes most of her career as working “at the interface of scientific research and commercialization,” and has developed a real passion for cultivating partnerships. A talented relationships builder, Catherine loved working with multi-disciplinary teams that included scientists, project managers, attorneys, and advocates to “ensure that the products that came out of the research would be made affordable and available in low- and middle-income countries.”

“We all worked together to determine the best way to structure these partnerships,” she added, so that whoever owned the rights to a new medical technology understood their responsibility to ensure global access to any products that might result.

Catherine has served as a board member for GHIAA since 2018 and is currently the Board Chair. Now retired from PATH, she’s particularly interested in how GHIAA and other organizations can support the African Union and Africa CDC’s goal of manufacturing 60% of Africa’s needed vaccines within the continent by 2040.

“I’m really happy about the increased presence of GHIAA;? the more organizations that know about our resources, the better.” Catherine hopes that GHIAA will continue to grow in recognition and serve as a resource for organizations navigating global access principles, particularly those in low-income countries, noting that GHIAA is becoming recognized as “a well-regarded resource for information on equitable access: how to implement it and how to negotiate agreements to ensure it will be achieved.”