
GSC seeks to nurture campus-wide cooperation on curricular and programmatic initiatives related to global health. Our aim is to promote the multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary study of global health among students and faculty by creating spaces for collaboration among scholars. In particular, we seek to understand the global burden of disease, social determinants of health, and treatment disparities from transnational and historical perspectives that are also attentive to the varied cultural and behavioral elements of health.
Global Health Case Competition
GSC and the Center for Global Health hosted Pitt's first Global Health Case Competition in October 2020. The Global Health Case Competition brought together undergraduate and graduate students to gain simulated professional experience by addressing a hypothetical global health scenario. Teams presented their strategy for 15 minutes to a panel of three experts and the top team will receive support to represent Pitt at the 2021 Emory University's International Case Competition. View the presentations of the first and second place 2020 competition.
Questions? Please contact Elaine Linn.
Past Mini-Course
Global Health and Climate Change Mini-Course
This course uses the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to highlight the multi-faceted field of global health. The SDGs address everything from gender equality to clean water and sanitation to affordable, clean energy. In examining how health intersects with these goals, this course draws on the expertise of Pitt and CMU as well as health and sustainability practitioners. Students who complete the course will understand how climate and sustainability contribute to good health and well-being from an truly interdisciplinary perspective.
With each global health crisis, the interconnectedness of populations around the globe becomes more pronounced. Diseases not only affect the health of communities, but they have a profound impact on political, economic, and social stability within countries and regions. This course engages the interdisciplinary nature of global health by approaching the issue through the lens of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) developed by the United Nations. The SDGs range in focus from good health and well-being to gender equality to clean water and sanitation to affordable, clean energy. By engaging the ways that health has a stake in these goals, the course will bring the expertise of faculty from the University of Pittsburgh and CMU as well as practitioners to understand and address the issue surrounding global health from a myriad of perspectives and avenues. With an applied focus, the course will assist students in engaging and advocating for a community on a global health issue through a policy memo. This iteration of the course will examine climate change and SDGs #13 and 15.
Questions? Please contact Veronica Dristas.
Emily Wanderer
Mari Webel
Mari Webel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History, specializing in modern Africa and the history of health. She received her Ph.D in 2012 from Columbia University, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in global health and African Studies at Emory University. Webel joined the Pitt faculty in 2014. Her book The Politics of Disease Control: Sleeping Sickness in Eastern Africa, 1890-1920, will be released this month in the New African Histories series of Ohio University Press. The Politics of Disease Control is a history of African politics and colonial public health, focusing on sleeping sickness at Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika. Her current project, The Neglected Tropical Diseases in Global Health’s History and Present examines the emergence of the “NTDs” as an operative and imaginative category in public health since the 1970s. She was awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s New Directions Fellowship in 2019 to pursue training in epidemiology and parasitology for her ongoing work on the history of the NTDs.
Veronica Dristas
Michael Goodhart
Contact about: GSC Research Initiatives, Ideas about Interdiciplinary Projects and Collaboration