César Chelala

Contributing Editor, The Globalist

[New York, United States]

César Chelala is a global health consultant and contributing editor for The Globalist.

Since 1980, he has worked as a consultant on planning, monitoring and evaluation of public health projects for several international agencies.

He has conducted health-related missions in over 50 countries for USAID, UNICEF, WHO, PAHO, UNFPA, UNDP, UNESCO, Capital Development Fund, the Guttmacher Institute, the Mexican Foundation for Health, World Education, the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Carnegie Corporation.

He earned his medical degree in 1964. In 1971, he came to the United States and worked as a researcher in molecular genetics and pharmacology at New York City’s Public Health Research Institute and later at the New York University School of Medicine.

He has written scientific and medical articles for The Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, Molecular and General Genetics, the British Medical Journal and Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

In 1979, he co-authored an article (with Paul H. Hoeffel) about the “disappeared” in Argentina. The article, “Missing or Dead in Argentina: The Desperate Search for Thousands of Abducted Victims,” was published as a cover story in The New York Times Magazine. The authors received the 1979 Overseas Press Club of America award for the best article on human rights.

He has received two national journalism awards from ADEPA, the organization of newspaper editors in Argentina. In 2015 he received the Chaski award from Taller Latinoamericano, a leading cultural institution in the U.S., and that same year he was awarded the Cedar of Lebanon Gold Medal from The House of Lebanon, in Tucumán, Argentina.

He has written for several newspapers around the world, among them: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The China Daily, The Daily News Egypt, The Japan Times, The Moscow Times, The News International (Pakistan), Le Monde Diplomatique (France), Asahi Shimbun (Japan), Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, Neue Zücher Zeitung, The Daily Star (Beirut), The Swiss Review of World Affairs and The International Herald Tribune.