Global Health Institute

On Tuesday, April 13, 2021, Ms. Lisa Carty, the director of the Humanitarian Financing and Resource Mobilization Division at the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), and a graduate of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, joined the Conversation for Global Health class. During Ms. Carty’s 25 years in foreign service, she worked in both multilateral organizations as well as the private sector in the United States and abroad. Her wide span of experiences provided her with a deep understanding of their contrasting yet somewhat complementary roles in addressing today’s global health challenges. Focusing on the responsibility and potential of multilateral partners, Ms. Carty stated that while multilateral systems are not perfect, “they hold tremendous resources and influence... to solve problems at scale.” 

On Tuesday, March 9, 2021, Dr. Margaret Hamburg joined the Conversations in Global Health class for a discussion spanning the many facets of her career, from her early medical training to her recent work as FDA commissioner, founder of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, and foreign secretary for the National Academies of Medicine. Dr. Hamburg began the conversation by reflecting on her career path, particularly how her experience as a medical student at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic fostered her interest in public health and ultimately led her to leave her residency in New York to learn more about health policy in DC. Her move was a sudden shift from the career in academic medicine she was pursuing, but, as a basic scientist interested in policy, I appreciated that Dr. Hamburg was not looking to abandon her interests in medicine. Instead, she wanted to contextualize how medicine related to other issues like public health, social justice, law, and policy.