Global Health, PhD

The PhD Program in the School of Global Health will prepare the next generation of leaders needed to address global health challenges of the 21^st century. The program will cultivate critical and solutions-focused scholarship, enabling students to engage in interdisciplinary, original research that provides a foundation for advancing transformational changes in global health research, practice, and policy.

The program is based within an innovative and exciting research and training environment at the School of Global Health. Here, challenges such as climate change, infectious disease, pandemics, and chronic non-communicable diseases are addressed in light of their intersection with socioeconomic, political, and legal issues, and through partnerships that are rooted in global allyship, respect and anticolonial practice.​

The four-year PhD is uniquely designed to be student-centered, with in-built flexibility and individualization. Every PhD will centre around an independent learning plan comprising student-specific learning objectives and time-bound strategies, including courses and fieldwork. Requirements include a modular course building student skills and capacity for critical and transformative problem-solving (GH 6000), and a seminar course on interdisciplinary approaches and scientific and technological innovations in global health (GH 6100). Other courses are governed by students’ learning plans. PhD projects will begin upon successful completion of a comprehensive examination in year 2, though partnerships with project stakeholders will expectedly begin sooner. Doctoral project products may take the form of monographs, journal article manuscripts, multimodal professional portfolios, or other suitable materials. Mid-career professionals may explicitly address or be inspired by their employers’ needs. Cotutelles with another university and – unique to this program – internal cotutelles between the School of Global Health and another Faculty/department at York University may also be supported.

With explicit focus on interdisciplinarity, critical inquiry, equity, and problem-solving, the PhD program in Global Health is anticipatory of emerging visions of global health. Graduates will be agents of change fulfilling policy, leadership, and advocacy roles in education, research, health systems, government, multilateral organizations and industry, locally, nationally, and internationally.