Listen to Lori DiPrete Brown’s TedxUWMadison talk: “Start Small, Change the World”
Text of talk available in a blog post from her personal blog.
Lori DiPrete Brown, a global public health practitioner with experience in over 13 countries, joined the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health (SMPH) in 2003. She has played a leadership role in fostering and sustaining global health education and partnerships campus-wide. She serves on the faculty of the UW SMPH where she directs UW’s Graduate Certificate in Global Health, serves as co-principal investigator on UW’s Undergraduate Educational Initiative in Global Public Health, and co-chairs Wisconsin without Borders, a campus-wide global service learning effort. In 2012 she received the Dean’s teaching award for excellence in medical education. DiPrete Brown graduated from Yale College (BA, 1983), the Harvard School of Public Health (MS, 1988) and the Harvard Divinity School (MTS, 1988). She served in the U.S. Peace Corps in Honduras from 1983 to 1985.
DiPrete Brown’s contributions to education and engagement programs of the Global Health Institute are informed by 15 years of experience with international agencies including the U.S. Peace Corps, USAID, the Pan American Health Organization, WHO, Care, and Save the Children. She co-directs a highly subscribed undergraduate course entitled Introduction to Public Health: Local to Global Perspectives, which provides students with a framework for future public health study, service and citizenship. Her graduate seminar, Foundations for Global Health Practice, prepares students for field placements around the world, emphasizing place-based knowledge, reflection, measurable impacts, participatory planning and mutual benefits. In addition, DiPrete Brown offers courses in two of her areas of expertise: health care quality improvement in low-resource settings and programs for orphans and vulnerable children.
DiPrete Brown supports and promotes UW partnerships that foster healthcare quality improvement, leadership, and system strengthening. She leads the QI components of UW’s Twinning Partnership in Ethiopia, and has also supported QI efforts Zambia, South Africa, and Botswana. In 2012 she led UW’s first Quality Improvement Summer Institute, which included leaders from six countries. She also serves as a faculty leader for field courses in Mexico and Ecuador where students can participate in long-term partnerships for improved health and well-being.
The health and welfare of children and youth has been a major focus of DiPrete Brown’s career, including work with transitional programs for teens who reside in orphanages, and assuring the quality of child survival programs and services. In 2008 she authored a guidebook that served as a blueprint for PEPFAR/USAID’s Care that Counts initiative, which promotes a participatory approach to the development of care standards for the care of orphans and vulnerable children. Through this effort she engaged with national leaders from 14 countries to introduce the approach and provide advice about national policy development. DiPrete Brown currently serves on the Orphans and Vulnerable Children Technical Advisory Group for the US Peace Corps, and she facilitates a UW research circle (FACES) that explores rights-based, whole of society strategies to improve the health and wellbeing of highly vulnerable children around the world.
Prior to joining UW SMPH, DiPrete Brown served as a researcher and Deputy Director for USAID’s Quality Assurance Project, where she contributed to quality improvement and health system strengthening in 13 countries. She also held an adjunct appointment as a research associate at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she served as a lecturer in graduate courses and training programs for leaders from low-income countries. She has also worked as a health services researcher at the Harvard Institute for International development where she conducted field studies in Costa Rica and Cameroon.