Letter from the Director-Elect
Dear Friends of Global Health Studies (GHS),
Welcome to our new newsletter, a platform through which we’re hoping to keep our alumni, donors, students, and friends appraised of all the excellent things happening in the Program in Global Health Studies. There were lots of exciting events in the 2023-2024 year, the culmination of which was a celebration of GHS’s 20th Anniversary as a Program!
To mark GHS’s 20 years as a Program, we are initiating a $20 for 20 Years Campaign, and we hope all our amazing alumni will contribute. These funds will allow us to continue to innovate and support our outstanding students.
Creating, growing and supporting GHS for its first twenty years was only possible due to the tireless dedication of our founding Director, Dr. William Leonard, and his longtime collaborator, Dr. Dévora Grynspan, without whom this program would not have reached its current breadth or depth. In August, Dr. Leonard steps down after 20 years of extraordinary leadership and service as Director, and I will endeavor to fill his irreplaceable shoes.
Since its inception, GHS has experienced some remarkable milestones. These include the 2017 simultaneous addition of a GHS adjunct major, and in collaboration with Feinberg School of Medicine, the creation of the Accelerated Public Health Program allowing students to complete both their Bachelor’s and an MPH in five years. In Fall 2024, GHS launches a new PhD Certificate in Global Health.
Moreover, because of generous donor support and collaboration with the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, from 2009-2024 GHS has grown its dedicated faculty numbers substantially, going from one full time GHS faculty member in 2009 to seven full time teaching faculty in 2024, in addition to our three joint appointed tenured faculty from anthropology. GHS’s ability to meet expanding student demand for our courses and wider opportunities would not have been possible without this necessary expansion of our faculty numbers and the diverse and interdisciplinary expertise they bring with them.
Tremendous donor support also allows us to create a plethora of study abroad, research, and other academic and internship opportunities for our students, while removing financial and logistical barriers to their participation in these opportunities. You can read about some of these initiatives on our Thank You to our Donors page.
Finally, 2023-2024 marked our inaugural year of the annual GHS speaker series, with the generous support of the Provost’s Hollister Lecture Fund and an Alumnae of Northwestern University Grant. The first year of the series brought an array of esteemed global health scholars to campus to share their research on topics such as war as a global health threat, experiences of descendants of the USA’s last documented slave ship, AIDS and health in Brazil, and the history of scientific advancements on pandemic influenza. The series culminated in an April talk from our Radulovacki Visiting Scholar, Dr. Seye Abimbola, who helped us reimagine possibilities for a more equitable future in global health.
We hope you’ll check out the accomplishments of our GHS students, alumni, faculty and donor-funded initiatives in this newsletter. And if you’re an alum, we hope you’ll be in touch so we can learn about all the fantastic things you’ve been doing since graduating. We appreciate the opportunity to keep you connected with the program.
Here’s to another 20 years to come!
Director-Elect, Program in Global Health Studies