On Thursday, November 5th, at 7pm in Zankel, the Speakers Bureau will be hosting their fall keynote speaker, Dr. Paul Farmer. Dr. Farmer is a prominent anthropologist and physician, and is one of the founders of Partners in Health (PIH), which is an international non-profit organization that provides health care to impoverished communities all over the world. He is also the subject of the biography Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder. This event is certainly not one to miss, and the Speakers Bureau hopes that "Dr. Farmer will offer students the chance to consider how co-disciplinary innovation can help us solve some of the greatest global health issues of our time,” as stated by Jacob Reiskin, Treasurer of Speakers Bureau and Co-Editor in Chief of Skidmore News. Additional sponsors for event include the Dean of Faculty’s Office, the Dean of Students' Office, the departments of Anthropology, Government and Social Work, as well as the Skidmore News.
Tickets are available at the Zankel box office and the Case desk, and are free to students, faculty and staff.
Skidmore tickets are also available online to be held at will call.
A limited number of public tickets are also available for $8. (Sold Out as of 10/27)
Please see below for his entire biography:
Medical anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer has dedicated his life to improving health care for the world's poorest people. He is a founding director of Partners In Health (PIH), an international non-profit organization that, since 1987, has provided direct health care services and undertaken research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty. Dr. Farmer began his lifelong commitment to Haiti in 1983 while still a student, working with dispossessed farmers in Haiti’s Central Plateau. Starting with a one-building clinic in the village of Cange, Partners In Health’s project in Haiti has grown to a multi-service health complex that includes a primary school, an infirmary, a surgery wing, a training program for health outreach workers, a 104-bed hospital, a women’s clinic and a pediatric care facility. Over the past twenty years, PIH has expanded operations to twelve sites throughout Haiti and twelve additional countries around the globe. The work has become a model for health care for poor communities worldwide; Dr. Farmer and his colleagues in the US and abroad have pioneered novel community-based treatment strategies that demonstrate the delivery of high-quality health care in resource-poor settings.
Dr. Farmer holds an M.D. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he is the Kolokotrones University Professor and the Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is also Chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston. Dr. Farmer is also the United Nations Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Community Based Medicine and Lessons from Haiti.
Dr. Farmer has written extensively on health, human rights, and the consequences of social inequality. His most recent book is Reimagining Global Health: An Introduction.
Other titles include To Repair the World: Paul Farmer Speaks to the Next Generation; Haiti After the Earthquake; Partner to the Poor: A Paul Farmer Reader; Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor; The Uses of Haiti; Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues; and AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. Tracy Kidder's book Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World, chronicles the development of Dr. Farmer's work in Haiti and beyond.
Dr. Farmer is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association, the Outstanding International Physician (Nathan Davis) Award from the American Medical Association, a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and, with his PIH colleagues, the Hilton Humanitarian Prize. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.