Dr. Tim Evans came to the McGill School of Population and Global Health as the inaugural Director in September 2019 after nearly three decades as an entrepreneur for global health equity. I sat down with him to learn more about his career in global health and what brought him to McGill University.
Q. How did you find global health as your career path?
A. As a teenager, between finishing high school and beginning university, I was a volunteer in West Africa. I worked in very poor communities whose livelihoods revolved around subsistence agriculture whereby households worked their land to grow food to feed their families. In this setting, the vicious cycle between ill health and poverty became distressingly clear. Illnesses like malaria and river blindness inhibited people from working their lands. Without all hands on board during the farming season, the ability of a family to feed themselves was dramatically compromised. This experience inspired my doctorate work in Agricultural Economics where I examined the economic consequences of ill health and the wealth benefits for improved health.
Q. Why McGill and why now?
A. At this stage in my career, I wanted to come home to Canada to focus my energies on creating training and research programs that will help nurture the next generation of health leaders. McGill is a great university that has tremendous potential to contribute even more prominently to population and global health. Although we have all been swept up in the pandemic, it has been inspiring to see how faculty, staff and students have rallied to sustain a rich learning environment and contribute so generously and effectively to the pandemic.
Q. What guides your approach to population and global health?
A. Simply put: everyone, anywhere on this planet, should have the same opportunity to live a healthy life. There is no biological reason why mothers in one part of the world should have a 1,000-fold greater risk of dying in childbirth. Redressing inequities in health requires that we acknowledge and act upon the broad spectrum of social, economic and environmental forces that shape and stratify opportunities for health. All health systems face similar challenges and can benefit from drawing on the global pool of knowledge to tailor local health solutions. At the same time, there are shared health challenges like pandemics and climate change that require shared solutions that all countries can access equally like vaccines for COVID-19. Mobilizing this knowledge and know-how for health equity is the foundation of global health.
Q. What do people need to know about global health?
A. Global health is not something that happens far away from Montreal, or Quebec or Canada. Infectious threats like SARS-CoV-2 and tuberculosis are found everywhere. Climate change doesn’t recognize national borders. Trust in science and the safety of new medical products must be earned in all societies. The blind spots to racial inequities in health and mental illness are egregious not only in Canada but in virtually all countries of the world. Understanding predisposition to certain types of illness amongst Canada’s hundreds of ethnic diasporas is enhanced with viable knowledge linkages with their countries of origin. In short, global health recognizes that there is one world health to which we are all inextricably linked and where latent opportunities for novel solutions are abundant and waiting to be harnessed.
Q. What is the School of Population and Global Health going to do to support this vision for public and global health?
A. McGill has a long and rich legacy of engaging in population and global health issues. The diverse units that constitute the School reflect a large portion of that legacy; however, it is not about resting on our laurels but building on our strengths. Indeed, there is an exciting unity across our diverse constituents that recognizes our success is a function of how well we mobilize our modest resources towards the future, working with colleagues across disciplines and engaging with community partners beyond the university. McGill’s Senate just approved a new interfaculty undergraduate degree in population and global health. This new program responds to the growing expectations of students coming to McGill to learn across disciplines, to engage in experiential learning, and to become effective change agents locally and globally. Last year we launched a Pandemic and Emergency Readiness Lab that has taken on the challenge of vaccine equity with respect to COVID-19 vaccines. And in the next few years, we aim to ratchet up our efforts in areas such as youth mental health and well-being, climate change and planetary health, and digital health and data science. We live in exciting times and these are exciting times for the School!
Dr. Evans has been at the forefront of advancing global health equity and strengthening health systems delivery for more than 20 years. He has held leadership roles in NGOs, universities, charitable foundations and in United Nations' institutions around the world. Read his full biography.