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 the 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 2023-24: Sex and Gender: Transforming Global Health Practice

Almost all global health research includes consideration of gender or sex in one way or another, whether a focus of research or just a means to organize data.  Our 2023-24 theme is concerned with identifying and disseminating the best current thinking about how to deploy the concepts of gender, sex, and gender/sex across all domains of research but with a particular focus on global health justice. Key events to advance this line of scholarship and its application include a collaboration with the Ernst Strüngmann Forum on “Entangling Sex/Gender” (including a workshop in late 2023 and a following edited volume) with world-leading gender/sex scholars, and a co-organized plenary of “Unsettling the Binary” with the Human Biology Association in March 2024. CGH affiliate Dr Zachary DuBois is the expert lead for this year’s theme.