Joan Kaufman

Joan Kaufman is the Senior Director for Academic Programs at Schwarzman Scholars and Lecturer in Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Public health and China expert, she has lived and worked in China for over 15 of the last 40 years for the United Nations (1980—1984), the Ford Foundation (1996- 2001), the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (2002-2012), and Columbia University (2012-2016). Prior to joining Schwarzman Scholars, she was the Director of Columbia University’s Global Center for East Asia (Beijing) and Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health as well as Adjunct Professor of Global Health Policy at Tsinghua University’s Research Center for Public Health. In 2002, she founded and directed (for a decade) the AIDS Public Policy Project at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government where she also taught and worked with Harvard’s Hauser Center for Non-Profit Organizations. She was a Distinguished Scientist, Senior Lecturer, and Associate Director of the Masters in Health Policy and Management program at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management. Joan was a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies fellow at Harvard from 2001-2002 and was also selected as a Soros Reproductive Health and Rights Fellow in 2005. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She earned a Doctorate in Public Health from Harvard School of Public Health, following a BA and MA in Chinese Studies. She has taught and written on global health policy, HIV/AIDS, women’s rights, reproductive health, population, emerging infectious diseases, and civil society with a focus on China.