The Program on Global Health & Human Rights team at the Institute for Global Health is pleased to announce that Dr. Daniel Tarantola will be joining the Program as Adjunct Professor of Research. Dr. Tarantola brings with him a wealth of experience and a widely recognized body of work.
He began an international health career in 1971 in the context of emergency humanitarian medical missions to Nigeria and Peru. He was engaged in a movement with physician Bernard Kouchner, which resulted in the foundation of the widely recognized humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières—also known as Doctors Without Borders.
Dr. Tarantola was MSF’s first physician working in the field in 1973—in Burkina Faso. Early in his career, Daniel worked nearly two decades with the World Health Organization on large-scale international health programs, including the eradication of smallpox from Bangladesh from 1974 to 1978, childhood disease control programs from 1979 to 1984, the Expanded Program on Immunization, the Control of Diarrheal Diseases Program and the Acute Respiratory Infections Program. He also served as a senior member of the team that designed and started the launch of WHO’s Global program on HIV/AIDS from 1987 to 1990.
Having left WHO in 1991, Dr. Tarantola worked for eight years as a lecturer in the Department of Population and International Health at the Harvard School of Public Health, and a senior associate of the Harvard-based François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights where he began his close collaboration with Sofia Gruskin, director of the USC Program on Global Health & Human Rights.
From 1998 to 2004, Dr. Tarantola rejoined the WHO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, as a senior policy adviser to the WHO Director-General with a specific focus on health and human rights, HIV/AIDS and communicable diseases, and family health. During the latter part of this period, he served as director of the WHO Department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals. Between 2005 and 2010, Dr. Tarantola was appointed as a professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, where he lead a cross-faculty research initiative on health and human rights involving the faculties of medicine, law and arts, and social sciences.
Since 2010, Daniel has relocated to his own country, France, working with a number of partners, and internationally, on the interface and synergies between health, development and human rights as they relate, among other topics, to HIV; hepatitis C, poverty, human development, climate change, indigenous populations, migration, refugees and post-disaster impact mitigation. He continues to lead national HIV and immunization program evaluations in a range of countries.
Dr. Tarantola will serve as a resource to students from a distance, and plans to visit USC this spring from April 11 to 15 as a distinguished guest lecturer for the USC Global Health Lecture Series (date to be announced soon), and during his week-long visit has promised to engage with faculty and students across USC.
