Sue J. Goldie, Lee professor of public health and director of the Center for Health Decision Science at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), is the new faculty director of the Harvard Institute for Global Health (HIGH), President Drew Faust announced today.
In a letter to the Harvard community, Faust named global health as "one of the highest priorities of my presidency" and announced a change in name and status for the entity Goldie will lead. Formerly known as the Harvard Initiative for Global Health and classified as an interfaculty initiative, HIGH has been established as a University institute "to give it permanence and new prominence," Faust said.
"Global health is an area in which we already have world-class researchers, teachers, clinicians, and students," Provost Steven E. Hyman said in the University Gazette article on the changes at HIGH. "By bringing them all together as parts of a coordinated whole, without boundaries or silos, we expect to have far more impact."
At the same time, Faust announced the appointment of Paul Farmer, Presley professor of global health and social medicine, and David Cutler, Eckstein professor of applied economics, to lead HIGH's professional training and education programs.
Goldie, who teaches a course about decision science at HSPH and an undergraduate general-education course called "Global Health Challenges: Complexity of Evidence-Based Policy," has been on the HSPH faculty since 1998. She holds an M.D. and an M.P.H., and in 2005 was awarded a MacArthur grant for her work in applying decision science to public health. Harvard Magazine profiled Goldie, and her work on the human papillomavirus and cervical cancer, in 2002.
Goldie was previously the co-chair of HIGH's executive committee. Her new appointment comes after "a year-long, international search," Faust said. HIGH had been without a permanent director since 2007, when the founding director, Christopher Murray, departed for the University of Washington, where he now heads the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
Farmer, the cofounder of Partners in Health and also a MacArthur grant recipient, was the subject of the book Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder ’67, excerpted in Harvard Magazine in 2003. He was appointed to oversee global-health medical education and physician training for HIGH.
Cutler, who worked on healthcare reform in the Clinton administration and advised the Obama campaign on healthcare policy, will oversee undergraduate and graduate programs in global health. A 2000 Harvard Magazine article explored his quantitative-reasoning undergraduate Core course on health economics, and a 2004 article reviewed his book Your Money or Your Life: Strong Medicine for America's Healthcare System.
In the same week, Dartmouth president Jim Yong Kim—who with Farmer helped found and lead Partners in Health, and who until last year directed the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at HSPH—announced plans to establish the Dartmouth Center for Health Care Delivery Science. The center, founded with a $35-million anonymous gift, aims to bring together "the best minds—from management, systems engineering, anthropology, sociology, the medical humanities, environmental science, economics, health services research, and medicine" to improve healthcare quality and efficiency and eliminate disparities in care, Kim said.
