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DLSPH welcomes Jillian Kohler, Director of the Collaborative Doctoral Program in Global Health

September 15/2014

Dean Howard Hu is delighted to announce a new appointment in the School.  Jillian Kohler, Associate Professor in the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy and the Institute for Health Policy Management and Evaluation of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, is taking a leadership role in global health.  She is the new Director of the Collaborative Doctoral Program in Global Health (CDPGH) and will also be contributing towards the planning of the Undergraduate Initiative in Global and Public Health as well as other global health activities. 
 
Jillian will be working with Dean Hu and other faculty from the DLSPH to move CDPGH into the Institute for Global Health, Equity and Innovation (IGHEI) in the coming year. As part of this move, they plan to review and refine its recruitment strategies, governance, and resources with a view to make it competitive globally.
 
Here is a preview of some of their ideas: Solidifying this program into a University-wide educational, training and networking experience for graduate students. As part of the goal of broadening the CDPGH, this year they will be inviting IGHEI fellows to participate in the CDPGH Seminar Series to help foster discussion and debate and to expose students to different disciplinary understandings of global health issues.  They also plan to raise funds to offer competitive scholarships for graduate-level students. With this, the recruitment choreography will change so that the CDPGH becomes a signature doctoral program and a critical entry point into the University of Toronto. 
 
I am sure that many in the DLSPH community will have other ideas that are welcome. Please welcome Jillian to the School and read her brief biography below.
 
 
Jillian Clare Kohler, PhD, is an Associate Professor and Director of Global Health at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy and the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto as well as the Director of the Collaborative Doctoral Program in Global Health.  She is cross- appointed to the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. Her professional background includes in-house pharmaceutical policy work at Unicef,  the World Bank, and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), where she did field work in a range of countries including Brazil, Bulgaria, Haiti, and Romania. Dr. Kohler's research is focused on fair access to essential medicines with a particular focus on good governance and intellectual property rights.  She pioneered the methodology on good governance in the pharmaceutical system for the World Bank, which was subsequently adopted by the WHO and has been applied in more than 35 countries globally. She is the author of more than 100 policy papers, journal articles and book chapters on pharmaceutical policy and is a co-editor of The Power of Pills: Social, Ethical and Legal Issues in Drug Development, Marketing and Pricing Policies (2006) and Access to Medicines as a Human Right: Implications for Pharmaceutical Industry Responsibility (2012). Dr. Kohler is a technical adviser for the Access to Medicines Index and WHO Good Governance for Medicines Programme. She was a Peter and Patricia Gruber Fellowship in Global Justice at Yale University in 2013. She earned her B.A. and an M.A. in Political Science from McGill University and a Ph.D. in Politics from New York University.