July 10, 2024
The O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law is pleased to announce that Dr. Nina Schwalbe has joined as a senior scholar with the Center for Global Health Policy and Politics, a cross-campus collaboration between the O’Neill Institute and the Georgetown University School of Health.
“We are delighted to welcome Dr. Schwalbe and to benefit from her insights as one of the global health world’s keenest analysts of power and governance in international organizations,” said Dr. Matthew Kavanagh, director of the Center for Global Health Policy and Politics.
Dr. Schwalbe has held senior leadership positions in global health, including at UNICEF, where she directed the organization’s health programs in over 150 countries; at Gavi, the vaccine alliance, where, as managing director, she led on policy, strategy, market shaping, and monitoring and evaluation. She was also the founding director of the Open Society Foundations’ Global Public Health program. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she established USAID’s COVID-19 Vaccine Access and Delivery Initiative, serving as its first director.
Dr. Schwalbe, who completed her Ph.D. in public health at the University of the Witwatersrand, has focused her recent research on the pandemic treaty and on access to medicines policies, including those that drove vaccine inequality in New York City and globally.
“I am incredibly excited to join the team at the O’Neill Institute,” said Dr. Schwalbe. “The institute is at the cutting edge of public health policy, driving action to address inequity and its social and structural determinants.”
In her collaboration with the O’Neill Institute, Dr. Schwalbe will focus on helping to develop policy strategies that support the institute’s Center for Global Health Policy and Politics’ work on health equity and pandemics and contribute to research on the political economy of global health.
“As someone who has both led crucial public health programs and studied their empirical effects, Dr. Schwalbe is a model of an engaged scholar-practitioner whose work teaches us about how systems produce inequality and what we can concretely do to address that inequality,” said Katie Gottschalk, executive director at the O’Neill Institute.
Dr. Schwalbe is also the founder and CEO of Spark Street Advisors, a global public health advisory firm and think tank. She is on the faculty at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, a principal visiting fellow at the United Nations International Institute for Global Health, and a member of the Lancet Commission on Gender and Global Health. Earlier this year, Dr. Schwalbe joined the O’Neill Institute for an in-depth discussion on political and legal debates around a pandemic treaty.
Visit here to learn more about Nina Schwalbe and here to learn more about the work of the Center for Global Health Policy and Politics.