By Dan Hameiri Bowen
Today ReD is launching its Science Praxis and announcing its inaugural Director of Science. This investment will strengthen the scientific foundations of our practice, bringing new depth and rigour to the way we understand and address complex health challenges.
For over 20 years, ReD’s healthcare practice has worked at the intersection of philanthropy, global health, life sciences, and strategy. Our practice depends on moving between the humanities and the sciences, between lived experience and biology, institutions and evidence, behaviour and technology. Some of the most challenging problems of our time sit across these boundaries.
To work with our clients on those problems, we must not only understand institutions, systems, and people, but also the science at the heart of our clients’ work. This means complementing our human understanding with data and analytical techniques from the natural sciences, examining the fundamental biology that shapes our clients’ challenges, and working with them to turn their scientific research into credible thought leadership through publication and new forms of dissemination.
We see the value of this approach in our Partner Organisational Effectiveness work, where we use ethnographic techniques to understand and strengthen high-impact organisations funded by leading philanthropies. Accounting for the science behind their work, the disease realities they address, and the wider global health landscape in which they operate allows us to pair our ethnographically-rooted understanding of organisations with their scientific realities and ambitions. That combination helps us earn the trust of the organisations we support, ask difficult questions, challenge assumptions, and work alongside them to turn insight into change.
The Vaccine Trust Tool is another illustrative example. Grounded in some of ReD’s most immersive ethnographic research, the tool is designed to help people across the vaccine ecosystem understand, analyse and use trust to support vaccine uptake in some of the world’s most challenging contexts. Its impact depends not only on the quality of the underlying idea and our ability to measure and act on trust, but also on the quality of the epidemiological evidence that supports it.
Making our qualitative understanding of trust scalable and replicable required strong epidemiological muscle, including the design of studies that allow us to link trust and vaccine uptake. Publishing our work in The Lancet, providing technical assistance to vaccine programmes in Pakistan, and developing AI tools that help partners use our framework are not optional extras. They are prerequisites for adoption across the vaccine ecosystem and for realising the full potential of the work. As trust becomes increasingly central to the vaccine demand ecosystem, maintaining the highest scientific standards is essential to working and innovating in this space.
The ReD Science Praxis is an investment in the capabilities that support this kind of work. It builds on our roots in the humanities and social sciences and adds perspectives, tools, and leadership from the natural sciences. Our ambition is to bring scientific capacity into the heart of ReD’s established practice in sensemaking, strategy, philanthropy, and organisational change. The opportunity is not simply to understand the science shaping our clients’ worlds. It is to build the people and capabilities that bring human insight and natural scientific understanding together, allowing us to challenge the status quo, solve difficult problems, and develop original strategies for the worlds of tomorrow.
Dan Hameiri Bowen is ReD’s inaugural Director of Science. An epidemiologist, geneticist, and immunologist. Dan leads the scientific work on the Vaccine Trust Tool alongside and our engagements with the Gates Foundation on partner organisational effectiveness. He’s worked closely with the Foundation on their malaria modelling portfolio and leading institutions such as Ifakara Health Institute. He drives scientific rigour in our pharmaceutical work, alongside pursuing our medical publishing and research dissemination opportunities.