Understanding population health locally and globally is the first step toward developing solutions for public health crises.
The COVID-19 pandemic, HIV/AIDS, the health impacts of climate change, the American health care crisis, obesity, malnutrition, and food insecurities are global health challenges that pervade our daily news cycle and fuel policy debates.
Public health challenges play out on local and global stages, and are impacted by phenomena such as environmental degradation, war and civil unrest, immigration patterns, cultural practices, and differential access to preventive programs and treatment. The Community and Global Health (CGH) concentration helps students learn to analyze and understand public health in all its complexity.
Why study community and global health at Macalester?
The CGH concentration provides students with an array of analytical frameworks for understanding the complexities of population health and offers opportunities to integrate and apply these frameworks within the context of coursework, civic engagement, and independent research.
We build on the strong ties between the liberal arts and the core concepts of public health—a diverse, multidisciplinary field unified around the examination of human and animal health at the population level. Our faculty members are geographers, biologists, anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers, mathematicians, and historians, and they will help you view public health through each discipline’s lens—and connect the threads.
By recognizing the central importance of health within a global context, the issues, theories, and methodologies presented in this concentration will develop your skills in critical and quantitative reasoning, writing, and integrative learning, and prepare you for careers in health care, public health, and more.
Life after Macalester
Community and global health graduates have pursued medical school, nursing programs, graduate degrees in public health and other fields, research opportunities, policy careers, and more.
Community and global health in the cities
200+
Number of internships sites within 8 miles of campus, including Planned Parenthood, Neighborhood House, and United Hospital
The Minnesota Department of Health is 5 miles away from campus, where our students have done internships in the Injury and Violence Prevention Section, Health Risk Assessment, and Epidemiology and Surveillance
Recent research projects include emergency care at Hennepin County Medical Center, studies on pain management at Gillette Children's Hospital, and analyzing access to lung cancer screening at Hennepin Healthcare Research Institute
Join our community
- Every year, students in the CGH Senior Seminar host a poster session where they share the results of their independent research or civic engagement projects with the CGH community.
- CGH partners with many other departments to bring guest speakers to campus for events such as EnviroThursdays.