Building Global Health Partnerships That Last with Dévora Grynspan

• Born in Israel and raised in Costa Rica by parents who were World War II refugees, Grynspan developed an early curiosity about how history, politics, economics and culture shape societies. She discusses how those experiences led her to study economics and political science at Northwestern and pursue an interdisciplinary career in international relations.
• Grynspan recounts how she brought together faculty from medicine, anthropology, law, and other disciplines to develop international public health education opportunities. Beginning with federal funding in 2001, these efforts grew into Northwestern's undergraduate global health studies program, which she co-founded with Bill Leonard. She describes the overwhelming student interest and the development of immersive programs in South Africa, Mexico, China, and other countries.
• Drawing on her experiences in Costa Rica and her work across continents, Grynspan explains why effective global health initiatives must account for each country's political history, healthcare policies, economic conditions, and cultural perspectives. She also discusses how comparative international experiences help students understand different healthcare systems and approaches to public health.
• Reflecting on Northwestern's longstanding relationship with Stellenbosch University, Grynspan emphasizes that successful partnerships require mutual benefits, institutional support, and opportunities for students and faculty on both sides. She explains how the new Global Health Knowledge Hub can strengthen research collaborations, mentorship, and educational exchanges while creating a foundation for deeper institutional connections.
• Looking ahead, Grynspan envisions a more integrated model of international education, including expanded faculty exchanges, collaborative research and potential joint degree programs. She closes by encouraging students and early-career professionals to pursue experiential learning abroad, embrace unfamiliar environments and recognize how international experiences can shape their careers and perspectives.

[00:00:00] Dr. Rob Murphy: Welcome to the Explore Global Health Podcast. I'm Dr. Rob Murphy, executive director of the Havey Institute for Global Health here at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Welcome to a special edition of Explore Global Health recorded during the Stellenbosch University, Northwestern University Global Health Knowledge Hub Conference. The partnership between Northwestern and Stellenbosch stretches back more than two decades, and the creation of the Global Health Knowledge Hub marks a new chapter bringing together researchers, educators, and students across continents to collaborate on some of the most complex challenges in global health. Joining me now is Dr. Dévora Grynspan, Northwestern University's vice president for international relations and a member of the Global Health Knowledge Hub Steering Committee. For decades, Dévora has helped shape Northwestern's international engagement, developing programs and partnerships around the world. She also co-founded Northwestern's undergraduate program in global health studies in 2004. Today we'll talk about the vision for the Knowledge Hub and what's emerging from this conference, but also about Dévora's own career and how international relations, higher education, and global health have become increasingly interconnected. Welcome, Dévora.

[00:01:20] Dévora Grynspan: Thank you. Nice to be here with you.

[00:01:22] Dr. Rob Murphy: Dévora, let's start with your own story. You were born in Israel, you grew up in Costa Rica, you built a career in international relations. What first sparked your passion for exploring the world across borders and cultures?

[00:01:36] Dévora Grynspan: Well, that's a very common experience, I guess, when your parents have gone through World War II, have been refugees. They immigrated to Israel. I was born there. Then they came to Costa Rica. I think they liked it because they stayed, and I grew up there. And of all the countries to end up in, Costa Rica was perfect: democratic, fabulous educational system, lovely culture, and nice people. So I grew up there, but I had an early interest in where my parents came from. What was it that led to the war, and to how people behaved? What variables explain how people behave in different contexts and different economic situations in different historical moments? So I started reading and taking an interest in international affairs, not as a career—I was a math major—but just because I wanted to understand. My effort to understand things was always very comprehensive. I wanted to look at the economy and the social and the cultural and everything about the situation. So when I came to the U.S. for school, at Northwestern, I came as an undergraduate. I double-majored: economics and political science. And started specializing in Latin American politics, but I also saw the importance of understanding how societies behave, what is the impact of international relations and of the colonial experience, but also the cultures of the different countries, you know, how is Argentina different from Colombia, from the Andes and the Andean countries? So I always took an interest, and especially as a Latin Americanist, I noticed that most people who specialized in Latin American politics didn't incorporate art and music and culture into their teaching, into their research. So that's how I became interested in this more interdisciplinary approach to international relations.

[00:03:38] Dr. Rob Murphy: How did that background shape the way you build global health partnerships today?

[00:03:42] Dévora Grynspan: I stayed at Northwestern after being an undergraduate at Northwestern. I stayed for my Ph.D. And my dissertation research was about foreign investment and the impact of foreign investment models on employment and the balance of payments and technological development and entrepreneurship. So I was interested in health, not because I was interested in medicine, but because I understood, having grown up in Costa Rica, that healthcare was very, very important. In Costa Rica, there's socialized medicine. We were all very proud that people had access to healthcare. So healthcare policy became one of my interests, which is why we ended up here, but not immediately. That was not my expertise. That was not my research for my dissertation.

[00:04:33] Dr. Rob Murphy: With decades of experience spanning programs across Africa, Europe, Asia, and Latin America, what have you learned is the secret to making international university partnerships truly work? Certainly, I don't know if anybody else in this institution, Northwestern, has worked in as many countries as you.

[00:04:52] Dévora Grynspan: When I came to Northwestern, and this is directly relevant to our global health programs here, I was at the University of Illinois and I had done a lot of interdisciplinary programs and applied for grants for them. So when I decided to come back to Northwestern, I thought to myself, what do I do that is interdisciplinary? What do I focus on that brings different parts of the university together? And medicine and healthcare seemed like the obvious thing. We had a wonderful medical school. We had biomedical engineering. We had biomedical reporting at the Medill School of Journalism. We had healthcare management at Kellogg. We had anthropology, medical anthropology. So I thought that made perfect sense, especially at that moment in history with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. So when I came to Northwestern, I had already decided in my mind that that would be what I wanted to do. So I had a relationship with the National Security Education Program, the Department of Defense. It was a program then, and I had gotten grants from them. So I went to Bill Leonard in anthropology and to different people in medicine, in law, and I asked for their ideas, and we wrote a proposal and we got funded. And my argument to the National Security Education Program was that healthcare, global health, was a matter of national security. That was the argument. You cannot be spending millions and millions of dollars in Africa and elsewhere without understanding the spread of disease in different contexts. And of course we made that argument. We gave examples and we proposed to do an undergraduate program in different countries. We proposed South Africa, China, Mexico, you know, which countries do we need to be in? And we did that. So, we created programs in all these places and it was difficult to form partnerships. It's labor-intensive. It requires leadership, of course, but it's also much more difficult to keep the partnerships going. How to make them successful, but what do you need for a partnership? Just the example of South Africa, for example. You need an institution that has an infrastructure, an international infrastructure, an institution that can host your students. You need a partner who sees the benefit; it's not only our benefit, but you need resources. That's more difficult. And then you need to think of ways in which that partnership survives when you are no longer the leader of that program. So we created very strong partnerships, and the idea was you start small, you start with an undergraduate program in global health or in development. And we created those programs around the world. And then the idea is you expand that program. You create a few more options, more opportunities for your students, clinical rotations for medical students, and then you create collaborations among faculty. That is the ultimate, because without those, you cannot really sustain the partnerships.

[00:07:55] Dr. Rob Murphy: You actually co-founded Northwestern's undergraduate program in global health studies back in 2004. Can you tell me a little bit about that program? How it started, how big it got, how important it was, and what it led to?

[00:08:09] Dévora Grynspan: So we received the grant from the government in 2001. Actually, we started the program without calling it a program in 2001, 2002, bringing together faculty who could design courses in international public health. Bill Leonard was my co-director, so we created the program at that time.

[00:08:30] Dr. Rob Murphy: Bill Leonard, now the co-director of the Global Education Center.

[00:08:34] Dévora Grynspan: And he was my partner all these years, and the idea was to offer a series of courses which we had proposed to the government so that students could get some training in international public health and to understand the complexities of global health. So we did that and then we started designing all these programs abroad in South Africa, in Mexico, and that was a lot of work. I did a lot of travel then to give the students an opportunity to do a hands-on experience to really learn about a country's global health system, not by going for three months to do research on their own, although that is also good. We created programs that were equivalent to a whole quarter. For example, every program we created in the various countries had a history and political development course, language and culture, and then two units of global health, for example. And obviously in South Africa the two units were related to HIV/AIDS; in China it was about traditional Chinese medicine and the combination of that with Western medicine, how to understand environmental health. So in each country it was a little different. So it was very exciting because we thought that the courses would be just a few interested students and suddenly we had hundreds waitlisted for each course in international public health. So we went to talk to the administration at that time in Arts and Sciences, and they suggested that instead of trying to do a certificate or do something else, why don't you create a minor? And that's what we created. At first it was a minor in global health. And we decided to make it more of an honors program by requiring that the students go abroad, and I thought that would reduce the size of the students. Well, it didn't happen. Again, more students signed up for the minor in global health and there was a lot of interest among high school students and students in general about global health during those years. So we would get high school students call us on the phone: "Can I go to South Africa?" I said, "Not as soon as you start. You know, you can go to South Africa later, your junior year." But it was a very popular program and we required that experience for a long time. We did programs in Uganda, Tanzania, Serbia and Bosnia, Mexico, France, and South Africa, and China. So we had programs all over. Not all of them survived today because some of those depended on faculty expertise. So if the faculty are no longer here, we cannot do the program in Tanzania, for example. But we still have the program in South Africa.

[00:11:11] Dr. Rob Murphy: What unique lens does an international relations perspective bring to solving complex health challenges?

[00:11:16] Dévora Grynspan: You have to understand the specific context of the spread of disease, how does it spread within the country's borders, and trying to contain any of these problems. It's not only global health, it's everything, right? The world economic crisis, it doesn't happen in one little country. It happens everywhere. So you have to understand that. Well, in the case of public health, it is obviously much more important because it travels in so many ways, especially when the world is so interconnected. So you have to understand from the point of view of the government, you have to understand what shapes health policy in different countries. What is the experience for me to come from Costa Rica and to have people be so suspicious of socialized medicine? For me, that was a totally foreign concept because both in Israel and in Costa Rica, you have universal health. So you have to understand where those things come from. How do you shape social policy in the case of healthcare? That is incredibly complex because it has to do with your history, with politics, with the nature of the populations who live there, with the homogeneity or diversity of the country. So an international relations lens, an interdisciplinary lens, is essential for the understanding of that complex problem.

[00:12:34] Dr. Rob Murphy: Of the top 20 high-income countries, the United States is the only one that does not have guaranteed healthcare for all its citizens. It's the only one of 20. I mean, we have it partly: Medicare, of course, Medicaid, a stopgap measure. But how many people don't even have Medicaid? I mean, the numbers, of course, as you know, are going up. We can learn more from these other countries, and they are doing it for a much cheaper price than we are.

[00:12:57] Dévora Grynspan: It is very good for our students and our scholars, but scholars from all over the world who go to, let's say, France. The program in Paris we have on public health is a comparative health policy program. The students learn about the health system in France, in Sweden, in other countries in Europe, and when they compare, they do research. They go to Geneva, to the World Health Organization to listen to lectures. So it's an attempt to explain to the students how the healthcare system is perceived and shaped in those countries. Very important.

[00:13:31] Dr. Rob Murphy: Here at the Stellenbosch University, Northwestern University Global Health Knowledge Hub Conference, we've been partners for over 20 years. Why was now the right time to launch this Global Health Knowledge Hub, and what do you see as the big picture in 10 years?

[00:13:47] Dévora Grynspan: I think it's just the right time. Having the hub in Stellenbosch, I think, provides an infrastructure for students to have a very interesting experience, not only going to class, but also participating with the biomedical engineers and with others in projects to see that it's something bigger than just a study abroad program where you sit in the classroom. It will bring mentors and supervision of research projects. So I think that will sustain not only the collaborations, but also the student experiences and the study abroad part of it. So, very, very good timing.

[00:14:24] Dr. Rob Murphy: Yeah. On the medical side, we were sending people to Tygerberg Hospital, which is the main teaching hospital for Stellenbosch University Medical School. And students had a great experience 'cause we had developed it. But over time, all of a sudden we started having a little pushback from Tygerberg. I had not been there up until that time, and I didn't understand why there was a problem. So I went there—I was very impressed with Tygerberg, first of all. And our students were really good there. I meet with them and they're like busy, and they say all the students from Europe and America, everybody wants to come here. What is it really doing for us? And I said, "Well, don't your students come to the United States or Europe?" She goes, "No, we cannot afford to send them." I said, "I think you don't know about our exchange program, which is actually written in our contract that we will accept students from there." It wasn't clear who was gonna pay. You know, and I said, "Well, you know, we can provide at least two scholarships per year for your students to come. We'll take care of them for one month. And if you have our students come, our students pay for everything themselves." And they were shocked. And they said, "We can send our students there for nothing or, you know, I mean, you're gonna pay?" Yeah, I said, "Okay, we can do that." And so we did. But it just had to take that personal connection. I didn't realize that was the problem, and they didn't realize they even had the opportunity.

[00:15:53] Dévora Grynspan: For a partnership to work, it has to be reciprocal. Our students benefit enormously from this experience. They learn so much. Their CV looks so fantastic that they had this experience as they go either to medical school or to government service or anything else. But if you don't provide the same opportunity to that university, what is the benefit for them? The Global Health Knowledge Hub will do part of it, but resources are needed to make the benefit mutual. That's the same with all partnerships. It has to be mutual.

[00:16:28] Dr. Rob Murphy: This program emphasizes working groups. It includes lab visits and making these personal connections. How crucial are these face-to-face relationships for sustaining long-term institutional collaborations?

[00:16:42] Dévora Grynspan: That is important, and not only at the faculty level. I think administrators need to travel. We were talking to the provost to invite him to come to Stellenbosch next year. I think that would be very important because it's all abstract. Sometimes, depending on the field of the administrator, maybe they go to Europe all the time, but they don't go to South Africa, right? They don't go to Africa in general. So when I started, I did take the provost—Provost Larry Duma and Dan Linzer, they traveled with me. They went to China, they went to Mexico. Because you have to see the other side. You have to see the skills and the expertise of the people our students are studying with, not to think that, ah, because we're in the U.S., no one has anything to teach us. And that's very damaging. So the best way to undermine that kind of arrogance is to take people with us and to see the programs in action. And Schapiro, when he was president, he led a delegation to South Africa. He took board members. Several of our trustees came with us to Africa, and we visited Stellenbosch and we had dinner with the president and the students—Wim, who is here at the conference. And he still remembers that relationship.

[00:17:57] Dr. Rob Murphy: Looking ahead five or 10 years, what would ultimate success look like for the Stellenbosch-Northwestern Global Health Knowledge Hub?

[00:18:06] Dévora Grynspan: Incrementally, of course, you want more research, more students, more everything. But qualitatively, there could be a number of things that make something, some program, really global. It's when the mobility, when the flow of faculty in and out—they can come here as scholars or faculty can lecture there. You integrate programs; think of it as a joint degree kind of interaction. So to make it global—not we go to that country and they come to this country and we do a conference, but to make it so that faculty lines and administrators are just participating in all kinds of programs together—that would make all our degrees much more exciting.

[00:18:50] Dr. Rob Murphy: I think the joint degree programs is a great solidifier of the relationship if we can get to that part. I think one thing that the Stellenbosch group has done, or the two things, is they provided a housing space, dedicated housing space for our students. That's a huge step. I don't know if people realize how

[00:19:09] Dévora Grynspan: challenging

[00:19:09] Dr. Rob Murphy: and rare that opportunity was, but that is really a good sign. They also have given us dedicated space for the engineers, and that has been a great help. So more programs, more things like that in the other departments and exchanges, as well as the training programs, I think, is really what's gonna keep this thing growing more closely together.

[00:19:32] Dévora Grynspan: I think the working groups would be important in that context. Because if you're going to join programs or join degrees or join training or any of those things that make it richer and make the connection deeper, the working groups are a good starting point. Because within their own expertise, within their own fields, they can imagine. Not all the fields can have the same approach because there are different requirements in all of them, different things to learn. That could happen in the case of health and the environment, that could happen. So working groups in this sense are important.

[00:20:08] Dr. Rob Murphy: I think they're a good catalyzer for developing relationships. The final question: What advice would you give young professionals today—students or young faculty members—what advice would you give them for developing a career in global health?

[00:20:21] Dévora Grynspan: I would talk to them about experiential learning, how important it is for everything. Don't think of all the responsibilities and all the grades you have to worry about and applications to medical school. Relax, go abroad, learn about global health, because you are not going to be able to do that naturally once you go into some profession. You'll have to do it as a student. And we're providing the opportunities for the undergraduates to do it, for the Master of Public Health students, for the medical students to do rotations. We're providing those opportunities, so take advantage of them. Don't be afraid. The world is very complicated, but you can still go out there and learn a lot, and what you learn in the field is gonna stay with you forever. You can be a better advisor to government agencies. You can be a better professional in any career you choose. So, just do it.

[00:21:16] Dr. Rob Murphy: Dévora Grynspan, thank you for joining us today and sharing your incredible experience with us.

[00:21:24] Dévora Grynspan: And it's been a wonderful partnership. So thank you, Rob.

[00:21:27] Dr. Rob Murphy: Follow us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts to hear the latest episodes and join our community that is dedicated to making a lasting positive impact on global health.