Rachel Hall-Clifford of Emory University's Center for the Study of Human Health is the 2023 recipient of the Jeffrey P. Koplan Global Health Award.
Rebecca Martin, vice president for Global Health at Emory University and director of Emory Global Health Institute (EGHI), presented the award to Hall-Clifford at EGHI's InFocus: Emory Excellence in Global Health event in November.
Martin recognized Hall-Clifford's work in global health, "here in Atlanta and around the world, as a medical anthropologist who applies social science approaches to global health research and implementation to improve health equity around the world."
Medical anthropologist Rachel Hall-Clifford is the 2023 recipient of the Jeffrey P. Koplan Global Health Award. She has conducted fieldwork in the central highlands of Guatemala on the delivery of health services for more than 15 years.
Hall-Clifford has conducted fieldwork in the central highlands of Guatemala on the delivery of health services for more than 15 years. Her research areas include accessible health care for marginalized populations, health systems strengthening in post-genocide contexts and global health fieldwork ethics.
She is an assistant professor in the Hubert Department of Global Health and Center for the Study of Human Health and Sociology, where she leads the Emory Co-Design Lab for Health Equity.
Examples of Hall-Clifford's global health impact include co-founding the Georgia USA Chapter of Women in Global Health and "safe+natal," a perinatal monitoring program and co-designed toolkit that recently received the Google.org AI for the Global Goals Impact Challenge Award. With support from the Google grant, the Emory and Maya Health Alliance partnership will expand the safe+natal initiative, which has demonstrated enormous success in improving pregnancy outcomes in rural Guatemala, a region with the highest neonatal mortality rates in Latin America, especially among the country's Indigenous Maya population.
"Our safe+natal team knew that maternal mortality is a huge problem in Guatemala and throughout the world," Hall-Clifford said in her acceptance speech. "But the Maya midwives knew it first. Co-design offers an opportunity to reduce the power asymmetries and promote health equity in global health. My goal is to keep working to bring safe+natal to scale as both a co-design model and as a toolkit that can reach others globally, including at home in Georgia, USA."
About the Jeffrey P. Koplan Award
Jeffrey P. Koplan founded Emory Global Health Institute in 2006 and served as Emory's vice president for global health and EGHI's director until 2021. He continues to serve as a senior strategic advisor to EGHI's Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance program and the International Association of National Public Health Institutes.
The Jeffrey P. Koplan Award is named in his honor and recognizes how he has inspired generations of global health leaders. The award is given to an Emory University student, staff or faculty member in recognition of outstanding academic merit or achievement, exemplary service or performance toward global health impact.
