Overview

Providing for the health of the poorest people in the world's poorest countries has increasingly become the focus of industrialized countries. Global Health is a field which involves the intersection of many disparate disciplines, such as infectious diseases / epidemiology, sanitation, economics, engineering/design, the environment, behavior, and others.

The domain of the far-ranging discipline of Global Health might include examples such as:

  • stemming an influenza pandemic,
  • providing clean water to those without,
  • creating new vaccines,
  • developing a health care policy for the provision of anti-retroviral therapy to those in need,
  • building or staffing a medical school in an underserved area,
  • studying the epidemiology of a disease in an area and recommending changes to the public health policy / management of that disease in that area, based on results of the research.

    Stanford has a plethora of activities that touch on global health, including research, education and clinical care.  There are investigator-driven research projects in all of Stanford’s schools and institutes, most notably in Medicine, H&S, Engineering, Business, Law, the Woods Institute, and the Freeman Spogli Institute.

The goals of this Application are to:

  • give students an understanding of the spectrum of challenges—from political, to sociological, to biomedical—that limit provision of health care to the world’s poorest people. 
  • provide students with insights into problem-solving for complex international health issues.
  • foster mentored hands-on experience in the field that applies knowledge attained in this application to real world problems of the world’s poorest people.