Transforming Global Health: Interdisciplinary Challenges, Perspectives, and Strategies

This contributed volume motivates and educates across fields about the major challenges in global health and the interdisciplinary strategies for solving them. Once the purview of public health, medicine, and nursing, global health is now an interdisciplinary endeavor that relies on expertise from anthropology to urban planning, economics to political science, geography to engineering. Scholars and practitioners in the health sciences are seeking knowledge from a wider array of fields while, simultaneously, students across majors have a growing interest in humanitarian issues and are pursuing knowledge and skills for impacting well-being across geographic and disciplinary borders.

Using a highly practical approach and illustrative case studies, each chapter of this edited volume frames a particular problem and illustrates how interdisciplinary problem-solving can address the greatest challenges in global health today. In doing so, each chapter spurs critical and creative thinking about emergent and future problems.

Topics explored among the chapters include:

• Transforming health and well-being for refugees and their communities
• Governing to deliver safe and affordable water
• The global crisis of antimicrobial resistance
• Low-tech, high-impact interventions to prevent neonatal mortality
• Communicating taboo health subjects
• Alternative housing delivery for slum upgrades

Transforming Global Health: Interdisciplinary Challenges, Perspectives, and Strategies is a vital and timely compendium for any reader invested in improving global health equity. It will find an audience with researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and program implementers, as well as undergraduate and graduate students and faculty in the fields of global health, public health, and the health sciences.

Korydon H. Smith, EdD, M.Arch, is professor and chair of the Department of Architecture and Co-lead of the Community Excellence in Global Health Equity at the University at Buffalo – State University of New York.

Pavani Kalluri Ram, MD, is a senior medical advisor for Child Health with the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and formerly associate professor in the School of Public Health and Health Professions and co-director of the Community of Excellence in Global Health Equity at the University at Buffalo – State University of New York.