Professor Gerry Bodeker
Professor Gerry Bodeker is a Common Room Member at Green Templeton College, University of Oxford.
Gerry, a public health researcher whose doctoral studies were at Harvard, joined then-Green College as a Visiting Fellow from the World Bank in Michaelmas term 1993. He subsequently held the position of Research Associate in the Green College Centre for Environmental Policy and Understanding, established and chaired by Green College Warden, Sir Crispin Tickell GCMG KCVO FZS, as well as in the Oxford Forestry Institute, led by Green College Vice-Warden Professor Jeffrey Burley CBE.
Gerry has remained a continuous affiliation with Green Templeton since then. He has held teaching and research appointments in the Nuffield Department of Medicine and the Department of Public Health and Primary Care from 1995 to 2015 and has worked closely from 1993 to the present with former Green College Vice-Warden, Oxford Emeritus Professor of Dermatology, Professor Terence Ryan, and more recently with Honorary GTC Fellow Professor Sir Muir Gray CBE FRCPSGlas FCLIP on a book on Healthy Ageing in Asia (2022).
His work has focussed on traditional medical systems, and more recently on wellbeing, and he holds adjunct professorships at Columbia University in New York and the University of Western Sydney.
Gerry began an association with Malaysia in late 1998 when the then Health Minister, Dato’ Chua Jui Ming, asked him to assist the Institute of Medical Research (IMR) in establishing a herbal research program. Gerry worked with IMR over a five-year period doing this and subsequently made KL his base for his work across Asia. Gerry has worked with the national sovereign wealth fund, Khazanah Nasional Berhad, and produced a book commissioned by Khazanah on Malaysian health traditions, Health and Beauty from the Rainforest: Malaysian Traditions of Ramuan.
More widely in the Asian region, he co-authored and co-edited with economists from the Asian Development Bank the 2021 book Wellness for a Healthy Asia. Gerry has served three terms as Vice-President of the Oxford and Cambridge Society of Malaysia and currently serves as a member of the Society’s Executive Committee.
