At the Alliance, we’re remembering the life and impact of Göran Sterky, a pioneering paediatrician, systems thinker and advocate for health equity, who died in November 2025 at the age of ninety-five. Sterky’s work helped shape the intellectual foundations of what is now known as health policy and systems research (HPSR), influencing global health governance and mentoring generations of researchers whose work continues to inform policy and practice today.
Sterky was Professor Emeritus of health care research at Karolinska Institutet, in Sweden, and founder of its Division of International Health Care Research (IHCAR).
From clinical medicine to systems thinking
Sterky’s systems perspective was forged early in his career, particularly during his work in Ethiopia in the 1960s and 1970s. An early Director of the Ethio-Swedish Paediatric Clinic in Addis Ababa, he confronted the daily realities of child illness driven by poverty, malnutrition and weak social infrastructure. These experiences convinced him that treating individual patients, while essential, was insufficient without addressing the economic, political and social systems that shaped health outcomes.
This insight guided his subsequent work linking health services with nutrition, agriculture and industry, including support for the development, production and distribution of FAFFA, a low-cost, protein-rich weaning food produced through the Ethiopian Nutrition Institute. It also shaped his insistence that practitioners be active producers of knowledge, embedding research in routine care and using health data as indicators of broader social development. These ideas anticipated many of the principles that now underpin learning health systems and embedded research approaches within HPSR.
Leadership roles at WHO
Sterky later brought this lens to the World Health Organization, where he served as Chief of Maternal and Child Health. At WHO Headquarters in Geneva, he became a prominent advocate for children’s health at a time when commercial interests increasingly shaped health markets. He played a pivotal role in the development of the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes, adopted by the World Health Assembly in 1981, working closely with civil society organizations to counter aggressive and misleading marketing practices by the infant formula industry.
Sterky was uncompromising in his defence of WHO’s normative authority. He argued that regulation of pharmaceutical and food marketing was a core public health function, not a technical afterthought. His critiques of inappropriate drug promotion laid early groundwork for later movements on access to medicines and the commercial determinants of health – now central areas of inquiry within HPSR.
Institutionalizing interdisciplinarity at IHCAR and shaping the Alliance
On returning to Sweden in 1983, Sterky founded IHCAR with a deliberately interdisciplinary mandate. At a time when international health was often equated with tropical medicine, IHCAR brought together epidemiology, anthropology, economics, sociology, nursing and political science within a medical university. This environment challenged disciplinary silos and trained researchers to analyse health systems as complex, adaptive entities shaped by policy, markets and social norms.
Sterky’s influence on the Alliance extended beyond ideas and mentorship to its very formation. Reflecting on this period, Göran Tomson, former chair of the Alliance’s Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee, recalled that: “In a corner office at IHCAR, preparations were made during 1996–97 for what became the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research, now a thriving part of WHO.”
This moment captures Sterky’s role as an enabler and institution builder – creating space for others to translate systems thinking into durable global platforms for research, learning and policy engagement.
Mentor, colleague, leader and legacy
Colleagues remember Sterky as both intellectually demanding and deeply humane. He was known for his disarming question: “How do you know this is true?”
Following his retirement, the Göran Sterky Foundation was established to support researchers from low- and middle-income countries to work on equal terms with peers at Karolinska Institutet. Through this foundation, his commitment to equity in knowledge production and capacity strengthening continues to shape new generations of health systems researchers.
For the Alliance, Göran Sterky is a founding spirit. He demonstrated that scientific rigour and social justice are mutually reinforcing, that health systems must be understood within their political and economic contexts, and that researchers have a responsibility to speak truth to power. His work is a reminder for the global HPSR community that evidence matters most when it is used to challenge inequity and improve lives.