UCPH Global Health Day

Dr. Saria Hassan work to address chronic conditions in humanitarian settings. Her area of interest is to use implementation science methods to address the needs of people living with non-communicable diseases during disasters and in humanitarian settings. Her degrees include: Medical Doctor, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, 2006 and a BSc, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 2001 

Dr. Hassan, MD is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Emory School of Medicine. She is an implementation scientist with an interest in addressing the needs of individuals with chronic disease in humanitarian settings. These include humanitarian settings that result from natural as well as man-made disasters. Dr. Hassan received her MD from Harvard Medical School and subsequently completed residency training in Adult Medicine and Pediatrics at the Yale School of Medicine. She subsequently worked in primary care with vulnerable populations in a federally qualified health center in New Haven, CT before she discovered the power of implementation science in addressing health disparities in the US and world-wide. 

Since 2016, Dr. Hassan has been conducting research in the Caribbean as part of the Yale Eastern Caribbean Health Outcomes Research Network (ECHORN). As part of ECHORN, she led the Implementation Core of an NIH/NIMHD funded U54 working on reducing the burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) through evidence-based interventions. When her colleagues and participants were severely affected by hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017, Dr. Hassan recognized the need to improve our ability to manage NCDs during disasters. This work is a high priority in the Caribbean, an area of the world prone to natural disasters, but also in other parts of the world where NCD care disruption results from both natural and man-made disasters. Dr. Hassan now has an NHLBI-funded grant to move the field forward in understanding the system changes needed to address NCD needs in disasters. 

Prof. Johanna Hanefeld is author of a seminal LANCET paper, outlining a global research agenda on migration, mobility, and health. She is a social scientist working on the political economy of global health, with expertise on health systems and their responses to mobile populations.  

Prof. Hanefeld leads the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) office in Berlin, a new collaboration with Charite Centre Global Health building LSHTM's presence in Europe. 

As Professor of Global Health Policy, her work is situated within the field of health policy and systems and focuses on the political economy of global health. Current research is on health systems, including resilience and quality, and on the impact of medical travel and migration. It includes policy analysis on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in Pakistan and Cambodia, work on trade and health including with the WTO, on governance and health inequalities. Actor power and network analysis are central themes across this programme of work, and all her research is empirical and most of it has been situated in low- and middle-income countries. She also has an active interest in the development of policy analysis methods. 

Prof. Hanefeld’s background is diverse: a policy analyst by training, she worked on HIV and AIDS, initially for the Panos Institute based in Zambia, as HIV researcher for Amnesty International and on health equity and social determinants for WHO. She continues an active engagement with WHO on health policy and equity. 

She was co-founder and remain an active member of the SHaPeS working group of Health Systems' Global which aims to bring together social science approaches for research and engagement in health policy and systems.   

Together with colleagues Dr Dina Balabanova and Dr Susannah Mayhew, she convenes the health systems working group at LSHTM.