Global Health Symposium Draws Experts

Experts on international health are converging on Cambridge this weekend in an attempt to pique students’ interest in topics ranging from AIDS activism to the way that global health is taught at the College.

Today, Christopher Murray, an adjunct professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, and Lincoln Chen, director of the Global Equity Initiative and a lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government, will speak on the “Challenges of Promoting International Health.”

Both professors have spent more than 15 years in health policy work with the World Health Organization. Organizer Sandeep Chidambar Kulkarni ’04 hinted that Murray and Chen’s talk could highlight the possibility of a new Global Health concentration or committee developing at the College in the next few years.

“This is the first major international relations conference for students that the [International Relations Council] has hosted in recent years,” Kulkarni said.

A panel on student activism last night kicked off the three-day symposium, sponsored by the International Relations Council (IRC).

With primary planning collaboration with the Harvard AIDS Coalition and the Weatherhead Institute for International Affairs, the symposium, entitled “Beyond Borders: Medicine and the Global Community,” features lectures from prominent figures in international health policy and activism.

“There are three underlying goals to this symposium: to present a wide variety of timely topics, to increase undergraduate student interaction with graduate schools and to show ways for students to get involved,” said Kulkarni.

Last night’s panelists spoke on a variety of issues in modern health care—both domestic and international—to an audience of approximately 20 undergraduates.

For example, Lisa E. Sachs ’04, an economics concentrator, spoke of her experience working in an orphanage in New Delhi, and also on a community health initiative in Uganda, where she co-founded a community health organization, KISCHO.

“Virtually every issue in a developing country stems from health issues, and its hard to address these varying issues without targeting the problems of international health,” Sachs said.

Other panelists, Sarika P. Bansal ’06, Bob T. Elliott ’05 and Sasha Post ’05, spoke of their experiences working for international health and development in India, Botswana and Washington D.C.

“There truly is a huge variety of experiences to be had,” Post said.

Kulkarni said he hopes that this symposium will lead to increased student outreach by the IRC and to more debate on international health and on related topics.

“The central theme of international health is the future... it would be amazing if we could mobilize the student population now, so that in 10 to 15 years when we are all policymakers, we’ll finally have a community that cares,” Sachs said.