Thanks for joining me today and thanks for your interest in this course on Global Health Diplomacy. Global Health Diplomacy is an emerging area and to date, I haven't found any other classes online focusing on this topic. Global Health Diplomacy is about how health issues are inheritably political. Sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. It's an intersection where politics, policy, finance, governance, and security come together. We'll talk more in the next class about Global Health Diplomacy and how it's defined. But for this session, I want to tell you a little bit about myself and the perspective that I bring to these issues. My name is Gabrielle Fitzgerald. I've been working at the intersection of policy, politics and global health for many years now. And these experiences have given me a unique perspective that I want to share with you during this class. I've spent the last decade working in philanthropy. With a focus on how we can use philanthropic resources to make progress in solving some of the biggest global health questions of our time. Eradicating polio, stopping Ebola outbreaks, and decreasing deaths from Malaria. In addition to philanthropy, I've worked in politics and government. So I have a first hand perspective of how policy is made. Throughout this course, I will share with you some of the knowledge I gained in working in these areas. Especially about how unusual sets of stakeholders have come together to create change on some of the really hard questions around global health. For example, when I started my career 20 plus years ago, global health was barely a blip on the public policy radar screen. Sure, there were doctors and public health experts, and scientists who cared about what was happening to people in foreign countries. But there was no talk of these issues in major political speeches or gatherings. Fast forward to February 2015, I had the great privilege and honor of attending a meeting hosted by President Obama on the Ebola outbreak. White House held this meeting with a dozen private sector and philanthropic leaders to thank them for their contributions to Ebola and discuss with them a road map to get to zero Ebola cases. The meeting was fascinating for several reasons. First, the idea that the President of the United States would spend more than an hour discussing a global health topic would have been unfathomable, just a short time ago. Second was the very impressive level of knowledge and detail that the president had on the Ebola outbreak. And finally, the fact that this meeting was happening with leaders from the technology, insurance and transportation sectors underscored not only how far the field has come. But how global health diplomacy has emerged as a critical aspect of global health. I've posted my biography on the website accompanying this course, but let me quickly run you through some of my work experiences so you get an understanding of my perspective. Most recently, I ran an Ebola initiative for philanthropist Paul Allen, one of the co-founders of Microsoft. He pledged $100 million to the fight against Ebola making him the largest philanthropic donor to that effort. Prior to that I spent ten years at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I had the chance to work on a range of global health issues during my time there, from TB to malaria to polio. And my last few years there, I ran our issue advocacy team, where we thought about how to use our philanthropic resources to move forward the 15 global issues we cared about. One way we did this was creating partnerships with governments and philanthropists around the world to achieve common goals. Before my time at the Gates Foundation, I spent five years at the U.S. agency for international development in their Washington D.C. headquarters. Working on their global health and humanitarian response teams. And earlier in my career, I worked as a speech writer at the White House, an advocate for refugees and a staffer on political campaigns. Hopefully this gives you a good sense of my background and where I'm coming from. But enough about me, let's get on with the course, I hope you enjoy it.
