Ethical Challenges in Global Public Health

Prof. Walter Ricciardi, MD

Prof. Walter Ricciardi is President of the World Federation of Public Health Associations. He graduated in medicine in 1986 and earned a doctorate in public health medicine in 1990 from the University of Naples. He currently holds the title of Professor of Hygiene and Public Health at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Rome where he is also Director of the Department of Public Health and Deputy Head of the Faculty of Medicine.

In addition to contributing to over 300 academic papers, primarily in the fields of Epidemiology, Health Services Research and Public Health Genomics, he is also Editor of the European Journal of Public Health, of the Oxford Handbook of Public Health Practice and Founding Editor of the Italian Journal of Public Health. Professor Ricciardi was Chair of the Public Health Section of the Higher Health Council.

In 2011 the Minister of Health of Italy appointed him as his representative in the State-Region Committee for the evaluation of the Italian National Health Service. Internationally, he is a member of the European Commission expert panel on “Investing in Health,” a member of the National Board of Medical Examiners of the United States of America, and has was elected President of the European Public Health Association from 2010–2014.

Dr. Kurt Straif, MD, Ph.D.

Dr. Straif is currently Visiting Professor of Epidemiology at Boston College. After medical studies in Liège (Belgium), Heidelberg and Bonn (Germany), he started his career in internal medicine in Bonn. With a fellowship of the German Academic Exchange Office he pursued an MPH at UCLA. Later, in Germany, he was assistant professor at the University of Giessen, focusing on occupational, environmental, and social medicine, and an assistant and associate professor in epidemiology and social medicine at the University of Muenster. At the same time, he completed a Ph.D. in epidemiology at the UCLA, with a focus on cancer epidemiology and epidemiologic methods.

Since 2001, he had leading positions at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), first as a senior epidemiologist, Head of the IARC Monographs programme, to classify carcinogenic hazards of all kinds of environmental exposures (chemical, biological, physical agents, and personal habits), Acting Head of a large epidemiological research group, and initiator of large international projects.

In 2014, he relaunched the IARC Handbooks of Cancer Prevention with a broad perspective on prevention (breast cancer screening, avoidance of obesity, and colorectal cancer screening). Since 2017 he also supervises the WHO Classification of Tumours (“Blue Books”).

In 2016 he received the Champion of Environmental Health Research Award in commemoration of fifty years of Environmental Health Research by the National Institutes of Health. In 2018, he presented the Distinguished Lecture in Occupational and Environmental Cancer at the U.S. National Cancer Institute..

Dr. Keith Martin, MD

Dr. Keith Martin is a physician who, since 2012, has served as the founding Executive Director of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH) based in Washington, DC which gathers over 170 academic institutions from around the world.

Between 1993-2011, Dr. Martin served as a Member of Parliament in Canada’s House of Commons and held shadow ministerial portfolios in foreign affairs, international development, and health. He also served as Canada’s Parliamentary Secretary for Defense. In 2004, he was appointed to the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada. His main areas of focus are in global health, foreign policy, security, international development, conservation and the environment. He is particularly interested in strengthening human resources capabilities and scaling up initiatives in low-income settings that improve environmental sustainability and human security.

As a parliamentarian, Dr. Martin created CanadaAid.ca, an online platform to facilitate partnerships between universities, governments, multilateral institutions, NGOs, and the private sector. In 2006, Dr. Martin founded Canada’s first all-party Conservation Caucus in Parliament and developed an online conservation site to help mainstream sustainable conservation and environmental practices.

Dr. Martin has been on numerous diplomatic missions to areas in crisis including Sudan, Zimbabwe, Mali, Niger, Sierra Leone, Colombia, and the Middle East. He served as a physician in South Africa on the Mozambique border during that country’s civil war. He has travelled widely in Africa. Dr. Martin is the author of more than 150 editorial pieces published in Canada’s major newspapers and has appeared frequently as a political and social commentator on television and radio. He is currently a board member of the Jane Goodall Institute, editorial board member for the Annals of Global Health and an advisor for the International Cancer Expert Corps. He contributed to the Lancet Commission on the Global Surgery Deficit, is a current commissioner on the Lancet-ISMMS Commission on Pollution, Health and Development and is a member of the Global Sepsis Alliance.

Prof. Philip J. Landrigan, MD, MSc, FAAP

Dr. Philip Landrigan is Director of the Global Public Health and the Common Good program at Boston College and director of the Global Observatory on Pollution and Health at Boston College. He is a pediatrician, public health physician, and epidemiologist. Author of over 700 scientific publications and 10 books, in his research he uses the tools of epidemiology to elucidate connections between toxic chemicals and human health, especially the health of infants and children. He is particularly interested in understanding how toxic chemicals injure the developing brains and nervous systems of children and in translating this knowledge into public policy to protect health.

In New York City, he worked for many years in the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and he was involved in the medical and epidemiologic follow-up of 20,000 9/11 rescue workers. From 2015 to 2017, he co-chaired the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health.

Prof. Michael Rozier, SJ, Ph.D.

Prof. Michael Rozier, SJ, is Assistant Professor of Health Management and Policy at the College for Public Health and Social Justice at Saint Louis University, with a secondary appointment in the Albert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics. He earned his Ph.D. in the Department of Health Management and Policy at the University of Michigan. After receiving his master of public health degree at Johns Hopkins University, in 2008 Fr. Rozier worked as an ethics fellow with the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. From 2008 to 2011, he was an instructor at Saint Louis University where he taught courses in global health, health and justice, and public health ethics. He was also the founding director of the College for Public Health and Social Justice’s undergraduate degree in public health and oversaw service learning activities, including several trips abroad with students.

His peer-reviewed work has been published in the American Journal of Public Health, Journal of Public Health Management and Practice, Journal of Religion and Health, and Public Health Ethics, among others. He is also a regular contributor on matters of public health and health policy to America and Health Progress, a publication of the Catholic Health Association.

His areas of research focus on goal-setting and resource allocation in low-income countries, the relationship of medical missions to the local health systems they serve and the ways public health ethics frames health challenges differently than medical ethics. Fr. Rozier lived and worked in Canada, Switzerland, and throughout Latin America.

Prof. Wendy K. Mariner

Wendy Mariner is Edward R. Utley Professor of Health Law, Bioethics and Human Rights at the Boston University School of Public Health, Professor of Law at BU School of Law, and Professor of Medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine. Her research focuses on laws governing health risks, including social and personal responsibility for risk creation, human rights, health insurance, health systems, including the Affordable Care Act and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, health information privacy, and population health policy. She has published more than 100 articles in the legal, medical, and health policy literature on patients and consumers’ rights, health care reform, insurance benefits, insurance regulation, public health, AIDS policy, research with human beings, and reproductive rights, and co-authored three editions of the law school textbook, Public Health Law (third edition 2019). She also serves as a Program Chair of the Program in Health Law and Human Rights, a joint project with the Public Health Regulations Analysis Center of the National School of Public Health of the New University of Lisbon. Currently, she is Chair of the American Bar Association Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice. Professor Mariner has served on many state, national, and international boards and commissions, as well as contributing editor for health law and ethics in prestigious journals. With colleagues, she submitted amicus curiae briefs to the United States Supreme Court in cases involving health law issues, including the Affordable Care Act.

Prof. David A. Wirth

David Wirth is Professor of Law at the Boston College Law School, where he served as Director of International Programs. Prof. Wirth teaches primarily in the field of public international law, with a particularly research interest in international environmental law–an area in which he worked and practiced for more than two decades. He also taught at Harvard, M.I.T., Oxford, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and the University of Virginia.

Prior to moving to academia, Prof. Wirth was Senior Attorney and Co-Director of the International Program at the Washington, D.C. office of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit public interest law firm specializing in environmental issues. While there, he worked on a variety of international environmental issues, including environmental reform of World Bank and regional development banks, the “greenhouse” effect, Soviet and eastern European environmental issues, stratospheric ozone depletion, and exports of hazardous substances.

Prof. Wirth has also been Attorney-Adviser for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs in the Office of the Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., where he had principal responsibility for all international environmental issues, where he was engaged in multilateral negotiations under the auspices of the United Nations Environment Program, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the UN Economic Commission for Europe, among others.

Prof. Wirth is a 1981 graduate of the Yale Law School and served as law clerk to Judge William H. Timbers of U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in chemistry from, respectively, Princeton University and Harvard University, at which he held a National Science Foundation Fellowship. He was also a Fulbright Scholar through the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Regional Research Program. 

He served as a consultant and on advisory boards of numerous institutions of higher learning, domestic agencies, and international organizations. A prolific writer, he is the author of more than fifty articles and reports. He is also co-author of major new editions of legal texts on international organizations and environmental law.

Prof. Daniel Daly, Ph.D.

Between 2008 and 2019, Prof. Daniel Daly was associate professor of moral theology at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, NH. He earned a Ph.D. in Theological Ethics from Boston College, in 2008. His research and publications fall into three categories. First, his current project develops a language for ethically scrutinizing global social structures to understand how social structures have a discernable moral character and to investigate how social structures facilitate or impede personal and social virtuous life.

Second, he is interested in questions in fundamental Catholic theological ethics. from happiness and the virtues, to natural law and moral norms, from the ethics of Thomas Aquinas to the common good.

Third, by focusing on medical ethics and, in particular, on death and dying, he reflects on the Catholic tradition, and on clinical decision making in an age of extraordinary medical resources and deep inequalities in access. He serves on the ethics boards of local hospitals. As a clinical medical ethicist, he assists in the adjudication of problematic cases that arise in these hospitals. In July 2019, Prof. Daly joined the School of Theology and Ministry at Boston College.

Prof. Alexandre A. Martins, MI, Ph.D.

Alexandre Martins, MI, is assistant professor in the Department of Theology at Marquette University where he earned his Ph.D. in 2017. He specializes in health care ethics and social ethics, especially in the areas of public health, global health, Catholic social teaching, and liberation theology. He is also a scholar in philosophy of religion, specialized in the work of the French philosopher Simone Weil. He has engaged ethics, theology, and health care in dialogue with anthropology, philosophy, epidemiology, and medical science, by focusing on marginalized voices and addressing issues from the perspective of the poor in their marginalized communities.

He advised the Brazilian Bishops’ Conference on issues of bioethics and pastoral care. With humanitarian organizations and in academic projects, he served in areas marked by poverty and lack of adequate health care assistance, such as Brazil, Bolivia, and Haiti.

Widely published, he has lectured in various countries. He was a visiting scholar at Saint Camillus University in São Paulo, Brazil, and at the Camillianum–International Institute of Pastoral Theology in Health at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome. He is also member of the Latin American Regional Committee of the Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church and of the Brazilian Society of Moral Theology.

Prof. Lisa Sowle Cahill

Dr. Cahill received her BA in Theology from Santa Clara University in 1970, followed by M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago Divinity School, where she wrote her dissertation under the supervision of James Gustafson. She is J. Donald Monan Professor in the Department of Theology at Boston College, where she has taught since 1976. She has been a Visiting Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University, Yale University, and Dharmaram University in Bangalore, India.

Dr. Cahill is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has held office in the American Academy of Religion. She was president of the Catholic Theological Society of America and the Society of Christian Ethics. She served as an editor, or on the editorial boards of many prestigious journals. In addition, she has been a member of the Catholic Health Association Theology and Ethics Advisory Committee, the National Advisory Board for Ethics in Reproduction, and served on the March of Dimes National Bioethics Committee. She has given testimony to the National Bioethics Advisory Commission on fetal tissue research and on cloning.

Her areas of interest and expertise, and very extensive publications, comprise the whole field of theological ethics. She has written or edited sixteen books and she is the author of over 200 essays that appeared in books or journals.

Prof. Tracy L. Regan

Prof. Tracy Regan is an applied microeconomist who earned her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 2003. She joined the Economics Department at the University of Miami and was a Visiting Scholar and then full-time lecturer in the Department of Economics in the Eller College of Business at the University of Arizona. In 2013 Regan joined the Economics Department at Boston College as an Associate Professor of the Practice.

She has extensive teaching experience with specializations in introductory microeconomics, labor economics, health economics, and industrial organization. Her research agenda combines her interests in labor economics–(gender) wage gaps, language acquisition, and the economics of the family–and on health economics–the pharmaceutical industry, the health insurance market, risky health behaviors, student identity, and adolescent academic outcomes. Regan has also published in the prestigious journals.

At Boston College, Regan has become involved in a wide variety of activities and committees that include the Women’s Center, the Athletics Department, the Lonergan Institute, the Center for Teaching Excellence, and the Gabelli Presidential Scholars Program.

Prof. Mary Ann Chirba

Mary Ann Chirba is John Ford Distinguished Scholar at the Boston College Law School. She holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from Colgate University and a J.D., magna cum laude, from the Boston College Law School. She holds a Doctorate of Science in Health Policy and Law as well as a Master’s in Public Health from the Harvard School of Public Health. She is the lead author of the 2-volume treatise Health Care Reform: Law and Practice - A Comprehensive Guide to the Affordable Care Act and its Implementing Regulations.

Since 1984, Prof. Chirba has taught a variety of courses at Boston College Law School. She is a full Professor of Legal Reasoning and a member of the Law School’s health law faculty. Prof. Chirba holds a joint faculty appointment with the Tufts Medical School and is an Adjunct Professor of Law at NYU Law School. In past years, Prof. Chirba was an adjunct faculty member at the Harvard School of Public Health. She lectured on a various health law issues at Harvard Medical School, Children’s Hospital of Boston, and Brandeis University.

Prof. Chirba serves as a member of numerous advisory boards. She published and spoken extensively on the Affordable Care Act. She was also invited to present at the World Stem Cell Summit and other domestic and international conferences on the national and international regulations of adult stem cell therapies and regenerative medicine.

Prof. Jacquineau Azetsop, S.J.

Jacquineau Azetsop is a Jesuit originally from Cameroon. He a holds a Ph.D. in social ethics from Boston College with a thesis focusing health inequality and social justice. He also earned a Masters of Public Health from the Bloomberg School of Public health at Johns Hopkins University and a licentiate in theological ethics from the Weston Jesuit School of Theology.

Jacquineau taught health policy, social aspects in public health, medical deontology and bioethics at the N’Djamena University’s School of Health Sciences and at the school of medicine of the Catholic University of Mozambique in Beira. Since 2014, he has been teaching courses on socioeconomic inequality, structural interventions in public health, social suffering and the sociology of health and illness at the Gregorian University in Rome, where he is the current dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences.

His broad research interests include cultural practices and human rights as related to health promotion, social ethics and health systems challenges, AIDS and social justice, Christianity and politics in Africa. He has published widely, including more than 20 research papers and book chapters and two books: Structural violence, population health and health equity and the edited volume HIV and AIDS in Africa: Christian reflections, Public Health and Social Transformation.

Prof. Stanislaus Alla, S.J., Ph.D.

Prof. Stanislaus Alla is a Jesuit from Andhra Pradesh, India, and teaches at the Vidyajyoti College of Theology, Delhi. He obtained a licentiate in Moral Theology from the Alfonsiana Academy in Rome, and a Ph.D. in Theological Ethics from Boston College. At Vidyajyoti he teaches courses in fundamental moral theology, virtue ethics, bioethics, and sexual ethics. He published on health care issues in the Indian context, by engaging Hindu bioethics.

Dr. Thana Cristina de Campos

Dr. de Campos is Assistant Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She is also a Research Associate at the UNESCO Chair in Bioethics and Human Rights (Rome); the Von Hügel Institute (St. Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge); and at Las Casas Institute (Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford). She holds a D.Phil. in Law from the University of Oxford, and an M.Phil. in International Law from the University of Sao Paulo.
Dr. de Campos researches in global bioethics, international human rights, legal theory, political and moral philosophy, with a particular interest in natural law, virtue ethics, global health governance, and the human right to health.

Besides numerous articles in prestigious journals, in 2017, she published the volume The Global Health Crisis: Ethical Responsibilities. Forthcoming is a co-edited book on The Philosophical Foundations of Medical Law.

Prof. Nadia N. Abuelezam, Sc.D.

Nadia Abuelezam is assistant professor at the Connell School of Nursing at Boston College and an epidemiologist. She has expertise in biostatistics, mitigating health inequities for minority health, and data analytic approaches in public health. Her current research focuses on immigrant health and, particularly, on women’s health and mental health outcomes. She relies on quantitative methods and novel data streams to better understand the inequalities in health care distribution and access in resource poor settings and among vulnerable populations.

Prof. Joyce K. Edmonds, Ph.D., M.P.H., R.N.

Joyce Edmonds is associate professor at the Connell School of Nursing at Boston College. Her primary research concentration is in maternal health. She approached this topic from a public health perspective in the domestic and global context, exploring factors that influence maternal mortality and cesarean delivery rates. Themes of her research include women’s childbirth beliefs and health seeking behaviors; the influence of social and cultural factors on birth outcomes; and the influence of the nursing profession on interventions and outcomes in childbirth. She is currently investigating how to measure the influence of labor and delivery nurses on birth outcomes and the factors that shape their practice patterns. She supports physiologic labor and birth in childbearing women and aims at improving the quality and equity of maternity care services.

Prof. Summer Sherburne Hawkins, Ph.D., M.S.

Associate Professor Summer Sherburne Hawkins joined the Boston College School of Social Work faculty in 2012. She is a social epidemiologist interested in addressing policy-relevant research questions in maternal and child health. Her research examines the impact of policies on health disparities in parents and children, particularly using methodology that integrates epidemiology and economics.

Dr. Hawkins published on the topics of parental and adolescent tobacco use, infant feeding practices, and childhood obesity as well as the impact of state and local policies on disparities in these health behaviors and outcomes. A more recent area of her research focuses on the role of the Affordable Care Act on the uptake of preventive health services. In January 2017, she received a 3-year grant from the American Cancer Society (ACA) titled: Impact of the ACA on the prevention and early detection of women’s cancers.

Dr. Hawkins is currently on the editorial board of the journal Maternal and Child Nutrition and an active member of the University Research Council at Boston College. Prior to joining BCSSW, Dr. Hawkins was a Cohort 7 Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Prof. Nils Hennig, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H.

Prof. Nils Hennig is the Director of the Master of Public Health Program at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Associate Director of the Mount Sinai Global Health Center.

Dr. Hennig, an expert in humanitarian aid, infectious diseases and public health, has broad international health experience. He worked for the past fifteen years as physician, medical director, research coordinator, advisor, and medical consultant for Médecins Sans Frontières, Médecins du Monde MENTOR (Malaria Emergency Technical and Operational Response), the Fogarty International Center of the National Institute of Health, EarthRights International, Projecto Xingu and other international organizations in humanitarian emergencies, fact finding missions, development, and research in the U.S. and many countries in the Global South–in Africa, Asia, Central America, the Caribbean, and Southern America.

Dr. Hennig has a long record of training medical and public health staff of various international organizations and ministries of health in public health and infectious diseases. Dr. Hennig works clinically as attending at the Pediatric HIV/AIDS Clinic at Mount Sinai, providing comprehensive care to infected/affected infants, children, adolescents and young adults. He also continues international relief work, research, advocacy and training for multiple agencies.

Prof. Paul E. Farmer, M.D., Ph.D.

Dr. Paul Farmer is Kolokotrones University Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine in the Blavatnik Institute, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, at the Harvard Medical School.

With his colleagues in the U.S. and abroad, he pioneered novel, community-based treatment strategies that demonstrate the delivery of high-quality health care in resource-poor settings in the U.S. and other countries. This work is documented in prestigious journals.

An engaging speaker, Dr. Farmer has written extensively on health and human rights, about the role of social inequalities in the distribution and outcome of infectious diseases, and about global health. His most recent books are In the Company of the Poor: Conversations with Dr. Paul Farmer and Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez and Reimagining Global Health: An Introduction. Other titles include: To Repair the World: Paul Farmer Speaks to the Next Generation, Haiti After the Earthquake, Partner to the Poor: A Paul Farmer Reader, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues, The Uses of Haiti, and AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. In addition, Dr. Farmer is co-editor of Women, Poverty, and AIDS: Sex, Drugs and Structural Violence, The Global Impact of Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis, and Global Health in Times of Violence.