By Peggy McInerny, Director of Communications
The popular global health minor of the UCLA International Institute brings together Bruins who major in the social sciences and humanities with life sciences and pre-med majors.
Above photos: Left — Chair of the global health minor, Ippolytos Kalofonos, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H. (Photo: Peggy McInerny/ UCLA.)
Right — La Paz, Bolivia (top) and Oaxaca, Mexico (bottom), locations of international global health internships offered by UCLA. La Paz: Courtesy of WikiCommons, 2005, cropped; CC BY-SA 3.0. Oaxaca: Michael Holloway via WikiCommons, 2018, cropped; CC BY-SA 4.0.
UCLA International Institute, October 7, 2024 — The global health minor of the International Institute has grown steadily since it was launched nine years ago, with an annual enrollment of 317 undergraduates as of spring 2024.
Conceived as a multidisciplinary program that would reap the expertise of faculty on North and South Campus, the curriculum provides students a solid foundation in social theory, the social determinants of health, epidemiology, environmental health, nutrition, data collection and evaluation methods.
The popular minor brings Bruins who major in the social sciences and humanities together with life sciences and pre-med majors. “It is a fun mix of students,” said Ippolytos Kalofonos, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., who begins his third year as program chair this fall.
“For a lot of the minors, there are some parts of the program are right in step with their major, but there’s often a part that is something they wouldn’t get otherwise,” explains Kalofonos.
“For folks in the social sciences, and maybe more arts and the humanities, it might be a technical class — say, in statistics, epidemiology or biology — that maybe they wouldn’t take otherwise. And for the more technical majors from South Campus, it’s more of an exploration of the social sciences and humanities relevant to their field — to their surprise, as they assumed none of that was relevant to them.”
Program chair and philosophy
Kalofonos joined UCLA in 2016 with a joint appointment in the International Institute and the Center for Social Medicine and the Humanities of the David Geffen School of Medicine and succeeded Professor Emeritus Michael Rodríguez, M.D./M.P.H., as program chair of the minor in 2022.
The psychiatrist and medical anthropologist is the author of “All I Eat is Medicine: Going Hungry in Mozambique’s AIDS Economy” (UC Press, 2021; see Q&A with author), which grew out of his doctoral research on a cohort of AIDS patients who received anti-retroviral treatment in central Mozambique. His fieldwork revealed that patients felt betrayed by the Western-funded program because it improved their health, but did not improve their livelihood prospects, leaving them hungry.
His more recent research addresses issues of psychiatry and homelessness from a social medicine perspective, including “Purity, Danger and Patriots: The Struggle for a Veteran Home during the COVID-19 Pandemic” (with Mattew McCoy; Pathogens, 2023, 12 (3): 482); “Meaning in Psychosis” (Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, May 2023 (47): 1090–1112); and “A Pilot Trial Examining the Effects of Veteran Voices and Visions” (with Michael Zito, Erica Fletcher, Ronald Calderon, Marian Nazinyan and Robert Kern; International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 2023, 70 (1): 123–131).
The global health minor reflects the philosophy of Paul Farmer, the world-famous doctor, medical anthropologist and global health expert. Farmer, explained Kalofonos, sought to use anthropology, sociology and history to “re-socialize” the more technical disciplines in which global health is usually discussed (e.g., clinical medicine, epidemiology, demographics, biology and genetics).
“These technical disciplines are often seen as divorced from the social dimension — they often have blinders on that they don’t see,” he said. “Re-socializing medical science with the social sciences and humanities brings an appreciation of the impact that context has on health and illness.
“There is a whole discipline of social medicine, of bringing social science to bear on clinical, medical and public health issues. And part of that discipline is to explicitly think about power relations.
“It’s important to teach how medicine and health sit within a power structure. They are not outside of it. I think people don’t make those connections naturally or easily,” he explained. “The social science lens helps you search for complex answers and not to be content with accepted wisdom, which often comes down to the idea that individuals get sick because they made bad decisions or had back luck.”
Curriculum and student opportunities
Students in the global health minor must fulfill two lower-division courses from an array of approved UCLA courses, plus five upper-division courses, one of which, Global Health and Development (GLB HLT 100), is required. (See worksheet for the minor.)
The remaining four elective courses can be chosen among courses specifically developed for the global health minor and UCLA courses in a broad variety of disciplines.
Lecturers with long experience in UNICEF and public health regularly offer courses on major multilateral health initiatives. Matthew McCoy (UCLA Ph.D. 2020, anthropology) of the Los Angeles Veterans Administration, offers a course on housing and homelessness that places the LA homelessness crisis in comparative global perspective.
UCLA faculty in the global health program frequently teach electives in their areas of expertise. Demographer Victor Agadjanian offers courses on the sociology of health and on fertility and migration worldwide; David Gere of the UCLA Art & Global Health Center, teaches on arts activism and health; and medical doctor and anthropologist Utpal Sandesara, on global reproductive health and state policy and on global health more generally.
The core required lecture course, Global Health and Development, provides an overview of social theory concepts and how they relate to health problems, using case studies. “Students in the course do a project where they apply some of these theories to a health problem,” said Kalofonos. “We encourage students to think of the project in terms of what they can do now as students, rather than, say, when they become a doctor in 10 years.
“Some students come up with information campaigns, others do small studies (such as a study of mental health issues among fellow students after the COVID-19 lockdowns) and some do more traditional projects, such as research on malnutrition in Haiti.”
For his project in Zikang Zang (UCLA 2024, microbiology B.S./ global health minor) was inspired to launch an LA branch of TechUp to help homeless people in Los Angeles master the technology literacy skills needed in a world of remote work and online meetings.
Working with a team, he said, “We reached out and partnered up with many local organizations, such as LA Family Housing, Weingart Housing and the Dialogue Society. Our digital equity workshops officially started in spring quarter, where we provided weekly hour-long workshops to individuals who were previously unhoused [and now living] in supportive housing and residents in senior apartments on the basics of smartphones and computers.”
Recent graduate Anthony Li (UCLA 2024, neuroscience B.S./ global health minor) is currently enrolled in the UCSF Global Health Sciences master’s program. “I really enjoyed Dr. Kalofonos’ class [GBL HLT 100], because it laid all the foundations and inspired me to pursue a global health career. I think his class was actually more informative and inspiring than the foundational class I am taking right now, surprisingly,” he said.
“I wish that all the elective courses could have been as structured like GLB HLT 100,” added Li, as he believed it successfully created a central knowledge base and encouraged focused discussions. Li was part of the multidisciplinary team of graduate and undergraduate Bruins who won the UCLA Global Health Case Competition in 2023, sponsored annually by the David Geffen School of Medicine Global Health Program.
The winning team of the UCLA Global Health Case Competition 2023 (from left): R: S. Udagawa, R. Modi, M. Corwin,
A. Li, M. Khorgamphar and J. Maradiaga. (Photo: Global Health Program, Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.)
The Origins and Dilemmas of Global Health elective, offered in spring 2024 for the first time, builds on the concepts presented in the core course, delving deeper into how social theory illuminates key issues and challenges in global health in a smaller class setting (roughly 50 students).
In addition to coursework, students can do global health summer internships for UCLA credit in La Paz, Bolivia and Oaxaca, Mexico, respectively, both of which involve observational clinical rotations.
Kalofonos is also working with colleagues in the UCLA schools of medicine and public health to create opportunities for global health students to participate in major research projects. Last year, he placed an undergraduate student with a research project on Cameroon, for which she helped analyze interviews that had been conducted in French. “The fact that that was a success inspired us to try to create more of those opportunities,” he said. “Right now we’re in the preliminary stages.” He added that a summer elective in Australia, with a focus on minoritized and indigenous communities, is also in the works.
Published: Monday, October 7, 2024