Michel Zaffran
Michel Zaffran is the Coordinator of WHO’s Expanded Programme on Immunization since April 2012.
He first joined WHO in 1987 as a Technical Officer in the Expanded Programme on Immunization working in the area of vaccine cold chain and logistics. He subsequently held several positions before taking on the post of Programme Manager of the Vaccines and Biologicals Department in 1998. At the same time, he represented WHO on the international working group that designed and launched the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI).
In 2003, Mr Zaffran became the Coordinator of WHO’s Access to Technologies team responsible for vaccine quality, vaccine management, vaccine procurement/supply and immunization financing. In 2006, he was appointed Deputy Executive Secretary of the GAVI Secretariat, in charge of Technical and Policy areas. In 2008, Mr Zaffran returned to WHO, as Director of project Optimize, a WHO-PATH collaboration aimed at catalysing a shared vision of the future logistics of health programmes.
Before joining WHO, Mr Zaffran worked for the French Ministry of Cooperation and the Paris based Groupe de Recherche et d'Echanges Technologiques (GRET), a French non-governmental organization in Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), Ethiopia and Morocco. Michel Zaffran is a French national born in Algeria. He started his career as an engineer from the Ecole Centrale (France) with subsequent training in tropical epidemiology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany.