Director's Letter Fall 2025
Dear Friends of Global Health Studies at Northwestern,
As the wider landscape in higher education this year has created substantial uncertainty, I want to take this moment to thank all the students, faculty, and staff for the spirit of creativity, collaboration, and resilience they’ve brought to our classrooms, meetings, and wider engagements.
GHS launched its 3rd annual speaker series, bringing Boston Globe investigative journalist and former global health practitioner Mara Kardas-Nelson to give a talk based on her outstanding book We are not able to live in the sky (Metropolitan Books, 2024). The book explores the promises and dangers of microfinance, tacking between the history of microfinance as an idea thought capable of pulling the poorest out of poverty, to the realities of women borrowers in Sierra Leone whose lives were largely immiserated due to the high interest on the loans.
We have other exciting speakers lined up for winter and spring—more info on this coming soon. If you’re in the area and wish to be kept informed of upcoming talks in our series, don’t forget to sign up for our weekly update, The Beat, or connect with us on Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
In other news, in Summer 2025, GHS alum (Weinberg 2010), CDC whistleblower, disease outbreak specialist, and physician Dr. Daniel Wozniczka taught a course for GHS titled “Disease Outbreak Investigation,” which gave students the opportunity to do case simulations of outbreaks and get an inside look at factors professionals working in epidemic intelligence must consider when outbreaks arise. The course, and Dr. Wozniczka’s wider experiences, were covered recently in The Daily Northwestern, and he plans to teach the course again in summer 2026!
And finally, GHS recently bid farewell to Dr. Charlayne Mitchell, who decided to move on from Northwestern. We at GHS are so grateful to have had Dr. Mitchell as our close colleague in the program for the last four years. Since joining the GHS faculty, Dr. Mitchell contributed to our mission of helping students understand the social and political determinants of health, and developed stellar new courses exploring the connections between racism, nutrition, politics, history, and health disparities in ways that deeply enriched the GHS community. A pedagogical innovator, Dr. Mitchell was highly sought after by fellow faculty across the university to learn about student-centered course design, and she made noteworthy contributions to research methodologies by centering Black feminist perspectives on research ethics and approaches in her publications. Dr. Mitchell has been a highly sought after mentor to students within and beyond GHS, and has made an indelible mark on our students. Dr. Mitchell will always be a treasured member of the GHS family. We are incredibly grateful for her contributions to our GHS community over the years, and wish her all the best.
As this calendar year comes to a close, on behalf of GHS I wish to thank all our wonderful donors and alumni, whose support continues to enable us to create learning, networking, and professional opportunities for the next generation of change-makers. We wish everyone a restorative holiday season and a new year full of possibilities.
Noelle Sullivan, Ph.D.
Director, Program in Global Health Studies