Jocalyn Clark

Jocalyn Clark is a Public Health Scientist and Executive Editor at The Lancet, where she leads the Commentary Section and coordinates peer review. She is also an Adjunct Professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto.

Clark earned her bachelor's degree in biochemistry and microbiology. During her undergraduate degree she became interested in infectious disease, particularly conditions such as trypanosomiasis, HIV and neglected tropical diseases that affect people in the developing world. Clark recognised that the causes of these diseases were social rather than biological, which inspired her to pursue a career in public health. She has a Master's degree in public health, and earned her PhD in Public Health Science at the University of Toronto. Having been awarded a full doctoral fellowship from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, where she was ranked the highest in the country for that year, her dissertation investigated the medicalisation of sexual assault and gender-equity in public health. Clark was offered a postdoctoral position at University of California, San Francisco, but chose to move to London to take up a fellowship at The BMJ.

Clark began her editing career at The BMJ, where she worked as an Assistant Editor from 2002 to 2007. She moved back to Canada in 2008, joining PLOS Medicine as a Senior Editor. Here she developed the magazine content and editorial policy. She was one of the first to write for a medical journal on the use of rape as a tool of war and the problems with the food and beverage industry in health. Clark believes that PLOS are uniquely positioned to comment on global health issues; as they are open-access and do not take money from the pharmaceutical industry.

As her interest in global health grew, Clark became keen to work a developing country. Clark served as Executive Editor for the journal of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B), where she trained doctors in scientific writing and publication. Whilst in Dhaka Clark wrote for The BMJ, The Guardian and Grand Challenges Canada. She completed a writing residency at Lake Como. Here she investigated the over medicalisation of global health at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, and wrote a four part series outlining whether global health had become too medicalised, the medicalisation of mental health, the medicalisation of non-communicable diseases and the Universal Health Coverage campaign.

In 2014 Clark was named as one of the Top 100 Women in Global Health. She examined the risks associated with predatory journals, particularly how they may impact scientists in the developing world. It was estimated that predatory journals earned $75 million in 2014. Clark joined The Lancet as Executive Editor in 2016. She commissioned and edited The Lancet Canada Series in 2016, which was a collection of scientific papers evaluating Canada's system of universal health care. It included commentaries from Jane Philpott and Justin Trudeau. She called for more action on the public health of indigenous populations.

Clark is committed to gender equality in science, whether that is in medical trials, research groups or scientific publishing. She founded the Canadian Women in Global Health list in 2018. The list was established to help conference organisers, journal editors, the media and funding bodies identify more diverse experts. In 2019 she led a theme issue of The Lancet that was focussed on women in medicine. Whilst women outnumber men in the Lancet workforce, men are considerably more likely to review and publish appears. Clark said that there were over 300 submissions from more than 40 countries for the Lancet Women. She stated that, "The evidence is clear, women are disadvantaged within science, medicine and global health. The source of that disadvantage is gender bias, which is a core feature of the very systems that organise these three fields". #LancetWomen was launched in February 2019, after which The Lancet committed to re-assembling their editorial boards to improve gender balance. She has questioned whether efforts toward gender equality will ever progress beyond institutional resistance.

She was elected to the Royal College of Physicians and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences in 2019. Clark serves on the advisory board of Global Health 5050.