Center for Global Health
Putting people first
The promise of global health requires us to address some of the most complex and difficult challenges facing humans. Sustainable solutions will need to address not just the medical, but also the complexly inter-related social, cultural, political, ecological and economic challenges we face in a globalized era. Our research, training and outreach efforts in global health are about understanding and supporting communities as they identify and manage the health challenges they define as priorities. Located in the school that has the nation’s foremost research-intensive anthropology program alongside the nation's largest global health undergraduate training program gives us a unique means to build global health solutions that put people first.
Each year our center pushes forward one ground-breaking and important theme that we believe can reinvent and reimagine how we do global health.
Center Theme 2026-27: Overdiagnosis
The rapid growth of diagnostic health technologies, such as wearables and online testing, promises new ways to prevent and cure disease but also produces unintended consequences. A key example is overdiagnosis—the detection of conditions that would never have caused harm—which can lead not just to increased user anxiety, but also unnecessary and potentially harmful interventions and amplifications of health inequities. Led by anthropologist and CGH affiliate Alexandra Brandt Ryborg Jønsson, we focus the Center’s efforts on deepening and broadening of social science theories of how overdiagnosis how new technologies and interact to change how we define what is “healthy,” how they might undermine public trust in science and medicine, and create barriers to the goal of better health for all.
Center Theme 2025-26: GLP-1 drugs and weight loss: Centering User’s Perspectives
Led by CGH affiliate and public health scholar Fernanda Scagliusi, our goal is to bring together social scientists doing research across the globe to identify challenges related to off label user experiences, needs and concerns around the new GLP-1 (“weight loss” drugs). Predicted to transform health care profoundly, potential and current users are reportedly struggling with unaffordability, supply chain shortages, denied insurance coverage, lack of clear data and medical guidelines for how to manage longer-term use, and complex inter-personal and cultural issues like deservedness and “cheating.”
Banner Image Credit: Map of health. Odra Noel. Source: Wellcome Collection. Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)