The USC Institute on Inequalities in Global Health (IIGH), with support from the USC Office of the Provost, is pleased to host the USC Global Health Symposium on Friday, March 28, 2025 on the University Park Campus. This dynamic event will bring together faculty, students, and staff from across all corners of the USC campus who are working in different facets of global health. The event will feature a keynote address, two plenary discussions, a student panel, a student poster session, and a range of opportunities for networking and collaboration, showcasing the wide range of global health expertise, diversity, and talent that the university offers.

Doors will open at 12:45 pm. A networking reception will immediately follow.

This program is open to all eligible individuals. IIGH operates all of its programs and activities consistent with the University’s Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor.

Provost Remarks

Provost Andrew T. Guzman is USC’s Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs. He oversees the overall academic enterprise of the university, including 18 of the university’s professional schools and academic units, USC Museums, and the divisions of student life, libraries, student religious and spiritual life, and enrollment services. He is the first Latinx Provost to serve at USC. Provost Guzman joined USC in 2015 to serve as dean of USC’s Gould School of Law. During the 2022-2023 academic year, he also served interim dean of USC Libraries. He began his role as Provost on July 1, 2023, and holds the Shelly and Ofer Nemirovsky Provost’s Chair and is an esteemed Law and Political Science Professor. A noted expert in international law and economics, Provost Guzman has written extensively on international trade, international regulatory matters, foreign direct investment, and public international law.

The Dr. Joel Breman Lecture in Global Health

Anand Grover is a designated Senior Advocate, practicing in the Supreme Court of India and the Director of the HIV/AIDS Unit of the Lawyer’s Collective (LCHAU, India). He was the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health from 2008-2014, a prominent animal rights advocate; active in criminal law fighting for victims of terrorist and free speech laws. As head of LCHAU, he has argued the pivotal cases about the rights of people living with HIV, of LGBT people in India, of sex workers and drug users, and on intellectual property fighting against patent monopolies in medicines; challenges to mass evictions and the Bhopal Gas Disaster case. He has spoken at national, regional, and international conferences and is a regular teacher at many academies. He is an adjunct professor at the Georgetown Law Center, Georgetown University, Washington D.C.

How is USC Engaging in the Work of Global Health?

Dean Carolyn Meltzer began her appointment as the Dean of the Keck School of Medicine of USC, and the John and May Hooval Dean’s Chair in Medicine, on March 1, 2022. Meltzer oversees the operations and academic affairs of the Keck School of Medicine, which is the home to 26 basic and clinical academic programs and 16 major research institutes. She serves as the academic leader of the Keck School faculty and staff, who perform biomedical research and clinical care, and train medical students, graduate students, postdoctoral trainees and undergraduates. Meltzer is an expert in neuroradiology and nuclear medicine and has conducted research to understand the brain’s structure and function during normal aging, dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and psychiatric disorders in later life. Meltzer was recruited from Emory University where she served as the William P. Timmie Professor and Chair, Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at Emory University for 15 years.

Laura Ferguson is an Associate Professor of Population and Public Health Sciences at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. She is the Director of the Program on Global Health & Human Rights and the Director of Research at the USC Institute on Inequalities in Global Health. She is also on the faculty of USC Dornsife’s Spatial Sciences Institute and she is an Associate Research Professor at Amref International University in Nairobi, Kenya. Her work focuses on understanding and addressing health system, structural, and societal factors that affect health, and developing the evidence base of how attention to human rights can improve health outcomes relating primarily to HIV, sexual and reproductive health, and child health. Ferguson serves on a range of expert advisory groups to the World Health Organization and UNAIDS. She is also an Associate Editor for Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters and the American Journal of Public Health.

Colin M. Maclay specializes in creating the conditions for innovation and change, which often means imagining and implementing creative responses to wicked problems in media, technology and culture. A hacker of universities and committed collaborator, Maclay connects scholarship and practice, bridges disciplines and sectors… and undermines hierarchies. He has worked around the world – especially in under-resourced communities – on innovation, democracy, sustainability, media, learning and policy. He is Research Professor of Communication and Director of USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, where he guides the Civic Media Fellowship Program, the Presidential Sustainability Solutions Postdoctoral Program, the Arts & Climate Collective and the Media As Socio-Technical Systems (MASTS) research group. Previously, Maclay founded the Harvard Business School’s Digital Initiative, spent a decade helping build and lead the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, and co-founded the Global Network Initiative.

Dima Mazen Qato serves as the Hygeia Centennial Chair and associate professor at the Mann School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. She is also a senior scholar with the Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics. At USC Mann, she is also the Director of the Program on Medicines and Public Health and conducts interdisciplinary research focusing on drug utilization, access to medicines and pharmaceutical policy both in the U.S. and globally to better understand why medications are used, or not used, and how they can and should be used in the population to promote equity, longevity and good health. Qato’s research focuses on equitable access and safe use of medicines in the context of health, human rights and humanitarian assistance. Qato was a National Academy of Medicine Pharmacy Fellow, Fulbright Scholar, PARC Fellow and RWJF Clinical Scholar. Her research is funded by NIH and other agencies and has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals including JAMA and Health Affairs. She has worked with various international NGOs, including Save the Children, UNDP, WHO and UNRWA in Jordan, Palestine, Afghanistan and Sudan.

Peter Redfield is Professor of Anthropology and Erburu Chair in Ethics, Globalization and Development at the University of Southern California. Trained as a cultural anthropologist sympathetic to history, he concentrates on circulations of science, technology and medicine in colonial and postcolonial contexts. The author of Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors Without Borders (University of California Press 2013) and Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana (University of California Press 2000), he is also co-editor of Forces of Compassion: Humanitarianism between Ethics and Politics (SAR Press 2011), and an issue of the journal Limn (2018) on the theme of “Little Development Devices and Humanitarian Goods.” He has held fellowships at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, in addition to serving as President of the Society for Cultural Anthropology.

How is USC Addressing Inequalities to Imagine a Healthier World?

Dean Franita Tolson is Dean and Carl Mason Franklin Chair in Law at the USC Gould School of Law. Her scholarship and teaching focus on the areas of election law, constitutional law, legal history, and employment discrimination. She has written on a range of topics including partisan gerrymandering, political parties, the Elections Clause, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the 14th and 15th Amendments. Her research has appeared in leading law reviews, and as a nationally recognized expert in election law, Tolson has written for or appeared as a commentator for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters and Bloomberg Law. At USC Gould, Tolson previously served as the interim dean and held the George T. and Harriet E. Pfleger Chair in Law. Prior to joining USC, Tolson was the Betty T. Ferguson Professor of Voting Rights at Florida State University College of Law and a visiting assistant professor at Northwestern University School of Law.

Mary Cheffers is an assistant program director for the Los Angeles General/USC Emergency Medicine Residency Program, a Voluntary Faculty at Keck School of Medicine, and has been a Faculty Advisor for the Keck Human Rights Clinic for the past 6 years. In this role, she coordinates advocacy work including forensic medical reports for asylum seekers, promotes medical advocacy for incarcerated individuals, and advises medical student advocacy work. She attended medical school at University of Massachusetts and completed her residency training with the LAC+USC Emergency Medicine Program. She has been involved in providing medical care to vulnerable populations across the border in Tijuana since residency in addition to her involvement in human rights advocacy domestically.

Jonathan E. Cohen is Professor of Clinical Population and Public Health Sciences at the University of Southern California and Director of Policy Engagement at the USC Institute on Inequalities in Global Health (IIGH). He represents the Keck School of Medicine and IIGH on USC’s new Capital Campus. Cohen was previously the Public Health Program Director at the Open Society Foundations. His work has contributed to the normative development of fields as diverse as access to essential medicines, harm reduction, HIV/AIDS, mental health, palliative care, and reproductive and sexual health. He is an emerging leader in the field of population aging and his current work seeks to equip low and middle-income countries to equitably confront the challenge and opportunity of population aging and demographic change. He holds degrees from Yale College, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Toronto Faculty of Law.

Bistra Dilkina is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California and holds the Dr. Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg Early Career Chair in Computer Science. She is also the co-Director of the USC Center for AI in Society (CAIS), a joint effort between the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. Dilkina's research focuses on advancing the state of the art in combinatorial optimization techniques for solving real-world large-scale problems, particularly ones that arise in sustainability areas such as biodiversity conservation planning and urban planning. Her work is at the intersection of discrete optimization and machine learning. Prior to joining USC, Dilkina was an Assistant Professor in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a co-director of the Data Science for Social Good Atlanta summer program. She received her PhD from Cornell University in 2012.

Manuel Pastor is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He currently directs the Equity Research Institute at USC. Pastor holds an economics Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is the inaugural holder of the Turpanjian Chair in Civil Society and Social Change at USC. Pastor’s research focuses on issues of the economic, environmental and social conditions facing low-income urban communities – and the social movements seeking to change those realities. He has authored multiple books on a range of critical issues within climate resilience, urban economics, and social justice, and has received fellowships and grants from a variety of organizations. Pastor speaks frequently on issues of demographic change, economic inequality, and community empowerment and has contributed opinion pieces to such outlets including the Los Angeles Times, the San Jose Mercury News, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Sacramento Bee, and The Hill, among many others.

A Conversation With Today’s Young Leaders in Global Health

Taylor Burkholder is an associate professor of clinical emergency medicine and the Director of Academic Programs at the USC Institute on Inequalities in Global Health. He received a bachelor’s in business administration from Georgetown University and his MD and MPH from Tulane University. He then trained in emergency medicine in Denver before completing a fellowship in global emergency medicine at the University of Colorado. He is a volunteer consultant for the World Health Organization’s Emergency, Trauma and Acute Care programme, and he currently researches implementation of health service delivery interventions and the governance of emergency care systems in low- and middle-income countries. Burkholder teaches courses on pre-departure training to enable ethical, equitable, and sustainable global health educational experiences.

Michael Donkor is a Ghanaian-American from Columbus, Ohio, pursuing a double major in Quantitative and Computational Biology and Global Health at USC, with a double minor in Healthcare Studies and Hip-Hop Dance. As a pre-med student, he aspires to become a physician-scientist specializing in pediatric surgery, conducting research in Biomedical Informatics to improve healthcare delivery and public health. At USC, he serves as a Dornsife Admissions Ambassador, Study Abroad Ambassador, and a member of African Americans in Health, recently joining USC’s Student Government as a Legislative Duty Aide. Donkor is passionate about mentorship and health equity, particularly in sexual and public health education. He is committed to creating opportunities to expand access to higher education and careers in global health, advocacy, and healthcare professions for underrepresented youth, especially in Ohio.

Rumaisa Islam is a current student in the Master’s in Applied Biostatistics and Epidemiology program at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. She recently completed her Bachelor’s in Cognitive Science with a minor in Global Health last May. Previously, she was involved with IIGH as a student worker supporting the Consortium of Universities for Global Health conference and was a fellow of the 2023 Sexual Rights for Social Change Academy. Currently, she works as a prevention educator in USC’s Confidential Advocacy, Resources, and Education Support Center. Given her academic background and experiences, she is especially passionate about health education, psychosocial health, and sexual health and rights, and she aspires to build a career in these fields.

Katherine Lewis is a current PhD student studying Health Behavior Research in the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences at the Keck School of Medicine. She completed her undergraduate degree in public health at University of Michigan and her MPH in Community Health Sciences at UCLA. Lewis’s research interests are focused on HIV/STI risk reduction and epidemiology with highly marginalized populations. Her current work at USC is focused on Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) implementation science with sex workers in India. Her other projects in the Klausner Research Group at USC have been focused on congenital syphilis, neonatal herpes simplex virus, and infertility. Lewis was awarded the Dhablania & Kim Global Medicine and Health Fellowship to travel to Kolkata, West Bengal, India in Summers 2024 and 2025 for HIV risk reduction research with sex workers.

Emily Mendonsa is a fourth-year medical student at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. Though she is originally from Texas, Mendonsa spent the majority of her childhood in a rural part of Kenya, an experience which motivated her to pursue a career in global health. Her research and advocacy work in medical school focused on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD). She received a Breman Global Health Immersion Fellowship from the USC Institute on Inequalities in Global Health in 2024 to partner with a local organization in the region of Kenya where she was raised to develop and pilot an educational curriculum on FASD. Prior to medical school, Emily earned her B.A. in Human Biology at Stanford and taught preschool for two years.

Apoorva Vishwanath is a SOCRA Certified Clinical Research Professional working as a clinical research data specialist in women’s oncology at USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center. She recognizes that the onus of caregiving falls on women and affects their emotional and mental dispositions, physical health, self-esteem, and relationships with others. Vishwanath advocates for empowering women to take control of their health through education and awareness with a focus on compassion, inclusivity and accessibility. She believes in integrating conventional and alternative approaches to achieve wellness. She received her BS from Bangalore University, India and BA from Loyola Marymount University. Vishwanath is a 2025 MPH candidate in Global Health from USC.

Wrap Up and Reflections from the Day

Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan is professor of electrical and computer engineering, computer science, linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, pediatrics and otolaryngology — head and neck surgery at the University of Southern California. As vice president for presidential initiatives, he provides intellectual leadership for transformative cross-cutting interdisciplinary initiatives of the president and the university in close partnership with the president’s senior leadership team and the deans of the cognizant schools. This includes the critical “moonshot” priorities and their intersections, setting the agenda and their ethical foundations, and connecting, coordinating and integrating talent, ideas and strengths across disciplines, schools and functional units. Narayanan leads in establishing and enabling exemplar pivotal North Stars in intersectional realms across the moonshots (e.g., Health Sciences 3.0, Frontiers of Computing, Sustainable Urban Futures, USC Competes), such as artificial intelligence in medicine/health, human condition across the life span and a just and equitable society. Narayanan is a widely-published award-winning researcher and educator.

Welcome and Closing Remarks

Sofia Gruskin directs the USC Institute on Inequalities in Global Health (IIGH). She is USC Distinguished Professor of Population, Public Health Sciences & Law, Professor of Preventive Medicine and Chief of the Disease Prevention, Policy and Global Health Division at the Keck School of Medicine, and Professor of Law and Preventive Medicine at the Gould School of Law. She has published extensively, including several books, training manuals and edited journal volumes, and more than 200 articles and chapters.