Global Health Institute

Stephanie Psaki, the first-ever U.S. coordinator for global health security at the White House during the Biden-Harris administration, spoke with students in Conversations in Health: Global to Local class on February 11, 2025. Psaki retraced her career volunteering on church volunteer trips to South and Central America to being an undergraduate student at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and later a public health graduate student at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Ph.D. student at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

In her senior year at Georgetown, Psaki wrote her honors thesis on the human rights-centered rationale for the United States to help alleviate the AIDS crisis in Africa. She faced pushback against arguments applying a country’s political obligation to human rights laws in the realm of health. Psaki persevered with this topic, knowing it was an important matter and her argument was sound; she ultimately completed her thesis on this issue. After graduating, Psaki saw the creation of PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which reflected her undergraduate research about U.S. responsibility to assist in international health matters.

Through her studies of public health and her work at the Population Council, a New York City-based think tank, Psaki noted the importance of asking the question: “Is this the right way to spend money?” when planning programs for specific demographics and complex issues from the distance of a conference room. She spent approximately eight years at the think tank, researching the impact of programs intended to advance girls’ education and rethinking assumptions about observed health issues through structured analysis.

Psaki noted her decision to work in government was partially motivated by the COVID-19 pandemic, during which she applied to work in the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.

Reflecting on her recent roles, Psaki talked about the importance of proactivity in public health security. She noted the difficulties in predicting how health crises around the world could affect the United States in the future and noted that, in the wake of decreased USAID funding, global health coordinators must now develop strategies that do not rely as heavily on U.S. resources as in the past. In her experience, it is less costly to prevent these crises from reaching U.S. shores than it is to resolve them once they become an international issue.

In a post-COVID world, hearing from a global health strategist like Psaki was extremely interesting, and her insights will be very helpful as we learn of the global health strategies the new administration in the White House will employ. 

Delaney Brown (SFS’27) is an undergraduate student at Georgetown University majoring in science, technology, and international affairs. She is a student in the Conversations in Health: Global to Local class.