About the Global Health Program
What is Global Health?
Global Health is at once an increasingly popular new field of study, an urgent social concern, and a powerful interdisciplinary intellectual synthesis aimed at understanding and productively intervening in processes of health, illness, and healing across the globe . Undergraduate degrees in the Global Health Program (BA and Minor) provide students with an in‐depth understanding of factors related to illness, health, and healing from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective that transcends national borders and regional interests and takes cultural difference and diversity fully into account.
- health care
- health education
- environmental effects on health
- infectious disease
- mental health
- health inequalities
- medical sequelae of natural disaster or political violence
- indigenous healing practices
- reproductive health
The program’s degrees are designed to be intellectually comprehensive, integrating the social sciences, biological sciences, and humanities. They combine academic and experiential learning, striking a balance between acquisition of hard skills, critical thinking, and real world knowledge .
The curriculum is highly student-centered and closely articulated with the UCSD Global Health Initiative and with themes outlined in UCSD’s Strategic Plan (Enriching Human Life and Society, Understanding and Protecting the Planet, and Understanding Cultures and Addressing Disparities in Society). The program has faculty participation from the Divisions of Social Sciences, Biological Sciences, and Arts & Humanities, the School of Medicine, the Rady School of Management, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, as well as collaboration from the International Center, Academic Internship Program, the Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies, the Center on Global Justice, and the Blum Cross-Border Initiative.
Course work spans the curricular categories of medical social sciences, biological sciences, health policy and planning, epidemiology, global social processes, and medical humanities. An important feature of the program is a Global Health Field Experience at a research, service, or clinical site either in the United States or abroad, which for majors culminates in a capstone seminar and senior thesis. The GHP's unique research and writing opportunities make both the BA and Minor excellent preparation for medical and graduate school, and for careers in health sciences, research and teaching, service-providing organizations, government agencies, or law.
