Jan and Jack Creighton Global Health Lecture Series
About the event
PRESENTER: Dr. Heidi Van Rooyen, Chair of the Department of Global Health, University of Washington
“From Silos to Systems: A Socioecological Perspective on Health Equity and Collective Resistance”
Dr Heidi van Rooyen is the new Chair of the Department of Global Health at the University of Washington. She is the first person from the Global South to take on this role of fostering equitable partnerships around the globe through research, education, and training. Her 30-year professional career spans government, higher education, and the science council environments. Heidi is an experienced executive leader, social scientist, clinical psychologist, and an internationally recognized and accomplished scholar. She has run successful interventions, implementation science projects and community-based studies addressing the health of women and children, HIV, COVID and sexual and reproductive health. Her research is framed by a desire to understand and address how inequities of gender, race, sexual orientation, and place, singularly and together, impact health outcomes. Her work is interdisciplinary, infusing public health with creative methodologies such as poetic inquiry and storytelling which results in science that gives voice, is action-oriented, empowering, impactful and transformative.
Drawing on two decades of interdisciplinary work in HIV, COVID-19, and gender equity, this talk frames One Health as a decolonial platform for “collective health.” One Health is often reduced to a simple aggregation of human, animal, and environmental data. To achieve truly resilient futures, we must transition from silos to systems by centering the principles of sociopolitical parity and socioecological equilibrium. We move beyond clinical models to problematize the marginalizing apparatuses that dictate who is granted health and who is exploited at the periphery. By analyzing six core pillars—from Surveillance to Food Systems—through a socioecological lens, we examine how inequities of race, gender, and place materialize in epidemiologic profiles. Infusing public health with creative methodologies like poetic inquiry and storytelling, this session advocates for a transformative science that gives voice to multispecies collectives and fosters the collective resistance necessary to break
Paul G. Allen School for Global Health. Our scientists in Pullman and around the world are recognized as global health leaders in infectious disease, antimicrobial resistance, rabies control and prevention, and zoonotic disease. We provide advanced graduate and post-doctoral training in infectious diseases and immunology.
See past and upcoming Global Health Seminars, and the procedure for proposing speakers.
Jan and Jack Creighton
Read stories about the Creightons and the impact their endowment is having.