[10] Following the West African Ebola virus epidemic, she worked with the Harvard Global Health Institute and London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine to assess international responses to the outbreak and use it to better inform preparations with future pandemics.
[15] Having received her bachelor's degree in biology at the age of 18, Sridhar became the youngest person in the U.S. to be awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at the University of Oxford.
[15] Sridhar turned down a funded position at Harvard Law School[16] to join the University of Oxford Global Economic Governance Programme in 2006, where she was awarded both MPhil and DPhil degrees.
She started to research the rise of public–private partnerships in global health governance, and how, whilst they are crucial to combat infectious disease, their non-transparent accountability and effectiveness should be investigated.
She worked with Chelsea Clinton and used principal agent theory to study the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the GAVI alliance.
"The aim was to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of these organisations, and their comparative advantages and relevance to health ministries, especially in low-income and middle-income countries", she explained, in an interview with The Lancet.
"[38] At a 2018 Hay Festival event, Sridhar warned of the risk of infectious disease from animal-to-human transmission travelling to the UK from China, saying "Our biggest health challenges are interconnected.
"[39] On 28 March 2020, The Lancet published a letter signed by Sridhar and 35 other professors, criticising the UK's secretive approach to the COVID-19 pandemic, saying "we request that the government urgently and openly shares the scientific evidence, data, and models it is using to inform current decision making related to COVID-19 public health interventions ... With the UK increasingly becoming an outlier globally in terms of its minimal social distancing population-level interventions, transparency is key to retaining the understanding, cooperation and trust of the scientific and healthcare communities as well as the general public, ultimately leading to a reduction of morbidity and mortality.
"[40][41] In April 2020, the Royal Society established its DELVE (Data Evaluation and Learning for Viral Epidemics) group, whose membership included Nobel laureates Venki Ramakrishnan and Daniel Kahneman as well as Sridhar.
[42] In addition to advising the UK's SAGE team, this group has published data-driven research on coronavirus disease 2019, including a paper in The Lancet,[43] whose recommendations were summed up in The Guardian by Sridhar as 1) Test, trace, and isolate 2) Give public health guidance on avoiding the virus and 3) Control borders to prevent reimportation.
"[45] Also in April, Sridhar was added to the Scottish Government's "time limited expert group," set up on 25 March 2020, to help develop and improve its plan for handling the COVID-19 pandemic in Scotland.
"[56] In August, Sridhar wrote a New York Times op-ed titled "We Will Pay for Our Summer Vacations With Winter Lockdowns," which was a reflection on the role of tourism and travel in community transmission of the virus, urging "strict border measures" for European countries to contain the coronavirus.
One of the evolutionary genetics researchers, Thomas Christie from the University of Edinburgh, noted that 'the second wave of COVID-19 in Scotland was caused by new strains of the virus brought in from abroad and other parts of the UK'.
[66][67] The letter, which calls for science-based public health policy and rejects "naturally acquired herd immunity" as a dangerous fallacy, received 2000 signatures from the science and healthcare community within 24 hours.
She also writes a regular column in The Guardian,[72] and did a special collection on "The World Bank and financing global health" in the British Medical Journal (BMJ).