Derek Yach, MBChB, MPH
Professor of Public Health and Head of the Division of Global Health, School of Medicine, Yale University; Director, Program on Global Health, Rockefeller Foundation

Challenges to How We Define Priorities
for Global Health

February 10, 2006
12:00 - 1:30 PM
Colonial Penn Center Auditorium

PowerPoint Presentation

Between 1995 and 2004, Professor Yach worked at the World Health Organization where he had responsibility for developing a new global “Health For All” policy, which was adopted by all governments in May 1998 after 2 years of intensive consultation. He established the Tobacco Free Initiative and ensured that the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control was accepted by governments, as well as placed chronic diseases and injuries higher on the agenda of governments, non-governmental organizations and the private sector.

Previous research, based in South Africa, where he established the Centre for Epidemiological Research at the Medical Research Council, focused on quantifying inequalities in health and the impact of urbanization on health.

His current research interests are two-fold: strengthening the analytic basis for studying the positive and negative impacts of globalization on health (including work on global governance of health), and secondly, on expanding developing country involvement in chronic disease prevention and control with a particular emphasis on issues related to nutrition transition, tobacco and secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease. He is co-editor, with Greg Martin of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, of Globalization and Health, an online journal devoted to the topic of globalization and its positive and negative effects on health, and a member of WHO and several international health advisory committees.