Vivek Neelakantan, an independent historian, earned a PhD in the History of Medicine from the University of Sydney in 2014. His dissertation examined Indonesia’s relations with the WHO during the Cold War and the appropriation of social medicine by nationalist physicians. His recently-published monograph Science, Public Health, and Nation-Building in Soekarno-Era Indonesia expounds on those themes and additionally, examines the geopolitics of health within the WHO Regional Office for Southeast Asia during the revolutionary period (1945-49). His monograph is currently being translated by KOMPAS into Bahasa Indonesia.

His current research project, supported by a Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine Research Fellowship (CHSTM), examines the growth of Primary Health paradigm in Southeast Asia (1948-1978).