Program Overview
Global Health
Finding successful solutions to health disparities
Investigative journalist and critically acclaimed author Sonia Shah ’90 presents "Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond" as part of Oberlin's Convocation series.
Photo credit: Yevhen Gulenko
Innovate better health outcomes across the world
Health professions represent the second highest employment sector among Oberlin alumni
Global Health Career Community
Oberlin’s career development center works with students interested in the field of global health to secure summer and winter term internships at the forefront of health research, advocacy, and service.
Oberlin College graduates have a 100% acceptance rate into Masters in Public Health Programs
Science with a Positive Social Impact
The curricular strengths of Oberlin’s science education combined with our ethos of social engagement prepare our students with the tools needed to make new discoveries, the skills to communicate them, and the passion to have them make a difference.
Featured Courses
NSCI 103
Foundations of Global Health: Addressing Health Disparities
Get an introduction to global health, the history of public health, and how the core areas can be integrated to promote health for populations worldwide. You’ll examine the connection between environmentally mediated disease and poverty, the social determinants of health, and the global disease burden. Actively learn through individual and team activities, discussions, research concept notes, framing memos, debates, and more.
- Taught by
- Gunnar Kwakye
ANTH 227
Medical Anthropology
Cultivate an anthropological understanding of the intersections between disease, health, society, the human body, culture, and global political economics. Drawing on accounts from across the globe, our studies include: cross-cultural definitions of disease, illness, and health; maladies from chronic pain to AIDS; health topics in disability studies and fat studies; health inequalities; and more.
- Taught by
- Hiroko Kumaki
RELG 249
Medical Ethics
Explore and analyze the methods of reasoning used to assess medical ethics issues, focusing on attendant religious, moral, and legal questions. The is a clinical course with case studies used throughout. Topics include death and dying in a medical context; privacy and informed consent; genetic testing and manipulation; medical research on vulnerable populations; organ procurement and transplantation; and more.
- Taught by
- Joyce Kloc Babyak
SOCI 216
Medical Sociology
Discover key concepts and theories in the subfield of medical sociology. Particular attention is paid to social inequality in health and medicine, highlighting how a person’s ability to prioritize wellness, survive illness, and find success in prominent healthcare professions reflects privilege and imbalanced distributions of power along lines of race, socioeconomic status, and gender.
- Taught by
- Alicia Smith-Tran ’10
Student and Alumni Spotlights
Epidemiology and Us
Oberlin alum Dr. Timothy Uyeki ’81 serves as the CDC’s Chief Medical Officer of the Influenza Division, educating the public about illness and pandemics. Now, with the podcast, Running to the Noise, he’s keeping his audience healthy and prepared.
Putting Health Policy into Action
Through an exciting internship at the Department of Health and Human Services, recent graduate Alana McBride ’24 got to apply her Oberlin background to real-world problems.
Breakthroughs in Huntington’s Disease Research
Tsitsi Zana ’24 conducted fascinating research on how chlorpyrifos, a common pesticide, impacts the progression of Huntington’s disease–and discovered her findings could aid in advocating for chemical safety and enhancing patient treatment.
