International Health Systems Program
The International Health Systems Program (IHSP) is a multidisciplinary team of faculty, scholars, and experts working to improve health systems in to improve health and living standards.
665 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA
IHSP Team
Kevin Croke, PhD, is the Director of the International Health Systems Program and an assistant professor of Global Health in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is also an assistant editor for health policy at Social Science and Medicine and a faculty affiliate of the HKS Center for International Development and the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies.
His research focuses on the politics of health and health systems and on the evaluation of large-scale health programs and policies. He has worked on health system research and policy in multiple countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe, and his research has been published in leading journals of political science, global health, and development economics. He received his PhD from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
Diana Bowser, ScD, MPH, is the Course Director for Global Executive Courses within the International Health Systems Program and has her primary academic appointment at Boston College as the Associate Dean for Research and Integrated Science at the Connell School of Nursing. She has 20 years of experience in health system analysis related to health economics, health policy, and using econometric methods to evaluate health system changes in Latin America, Africa, and the United States. She has provided technical assistance and conducted research with funding from USAID, DFID, WHO, the Global Fund, Save the Children, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, IADB, NIH, and the World Bank. She has worked closely with the following governments on these policy issues: Nigeria, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Ghana, Namibia, Swaziland, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Belize, Saint Lucia, Dominica, Ukraine, Kosovo, Bangladesh, and Malaysia. Dr. Bowser earned her BA from Harvard College, her MPH from Yale School of Public Health, and her Doctor of Science in health economics from the Harvard School of Public Health. She is fluent in Spanish and has lived in Latin America.
Sonja Luvara, MBA, MPP, MLA is the Program Manager of the International Health Systems Program in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She manages the international executive education courses for the program. She has worked both domestically in higher education as well as in South Africa and Egypt. She earned her MPP and MBA from The Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandies University and her BA in International Affairs from Northeastern University.
Gregory Director, MEd is a Program Coordinator for the International Health Systems Program in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He studied and received his Master’s Degree in Human and Organizational Development in Nashville, Tennessee at Vanderbilt University. Before joining IHSP, Gregory worked at New York University, where he was a Program Administrator for NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development
Affiliated Faculty and Experts
Thomas J. Bossert, PhD, Emeritus is the previous Director of the International Health Systems Program of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. He has many years of experience in international health in Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and Central and Eastern Europe. His specialties include health reform, decentralization, sustainability and transition, implementation science, social capital, human resources strategic planning and political feasibility analysis. His publications have appeared in Social Science and Medicine, Health Policy and Planning, WHO Bulletin, The Lancet among other journals and monographs. His innovative “decision space” approach to decentralization has appeared in many peer-reviewed journals and recently in an edited book on decentralization: Federalism and Decentralization in Health Care: A Decision Space Approach. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. He has developed a guide to strategic planning for human resources for WHO. His pioneering work on the sustainability of donor-funded projects was published in Social Science and Medicine in 1990, and he has recently studied sustainability and transition for projects funded by CDC and the Gates Foundation.
He has provided technical assistance and conducted research and project management for contracts with various donors, including USAID, DfID, World Bank, WHO and the Inter-American Development Bank. At Har…
Stephen Marks, is the founding dean of the Jindal School of Public Health and Human Development (JSPH) at O. P. Jindal Global University and François-Xavier Bagnoud Professor of Health and Human Rights Emeritus, Harvard University, where he was director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights and the Program on Human Rights in Development, in addition to teaching at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
With degrees in law and international relations from Stanford and several universities in France, as well as the Syrian Arab Republic, he has worked for the United States Senate (Washington, DC), the International Institute of Human Rights (Strasbourg, France), UNESCO (Paris, France), the Ford Foundation (New York), and UN peacekeeping operations (Cambodia, Western Sahara). Among his awards is that of Honorary Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
He has taught at several universities, including Columbia University and Princeton University, before serving as a tenured professor at Harvard from 1999 to 2022.
His publications focus on public health, international law, development, biotechnology, mass atrocities, terrorism, cultural rights, tobacco control, access to medicines, human rights education, neuroscience, mental health, and the right to health.