This two-week mini-course provides multidisciplinary trainees insight into over-arching themes of global health. Topics include systemic issues affecting healthcare progress globally, ethical and thoughtful approaches to solving these issues, as well as economics, water sanitation, public health, organizations in global health, human rights, involvement in NGOs, ethics of overseas work, and other non-medical aspects of this subject.

Steve Luby, MD. Director of Research, Center for Innovation in Global Health, teaches this two-day course for fellows, residents and medical students in Stanford’s School of Medicine interested in developing research skills applicable to global health.

In this course, participants will discuss and engage critically with current topics and pressing issues in global health through the lens of health equity and social justice. Topics include decolonizing global health, climate change, the health of indigenous populations, and other vulnerable populations, homelessness, and gender-based violence and mental health challenges.

This web-based course, developed through funding by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (DDCF), introduces some of the ethical issues that trainees in biomedical research and practice may face in resource-limited settings. Using ten cases adapted from real-world experiences, the modules will help users identify and develop strategies for navigating ethical issues they may experience.

Two of the biggest challenges humanity faces – promoting human health and halting environmental degradation – are strongly linked. Human and planetary health promotes creative, interdisciplinary solutions to these interconnected challenges. Through lectures and discussions, students will develop an in-depth understanding of planetary health.

This course in the Doerr School of Sustainability, SUSTAIN 140, attempts to make sense of a rapidly-changing reality and inform possible solutions through questioning the fundamental paradigms that underpin humanity’s narratives of progress and relationship with nature. [Note: As of Autumn 2023, this course is on hold while a larger Environmental Humanities program is designed. For more information, please email Erika Veidis at eveidis@stanford.edu].