The Laney Graduate School is pleased to announce that Dabney P. Evans, MPH, PhD will serve as Interim Director of the Institute for Developing Nations (IDN), effective immediately.

Partnering with The Carter Center and units across Emory, IDN is committed to finding new ways for higher education to help solve some of the world’s most complex development problems by connecting practitioners and scholars working to advance human rights and alleviate human suffering. Dr. Evans is exceptionally qualified to provide continuity in leadership for this mission.

Dr. Evans received her Master of Public Health degree in 1998 from Emory University and her doctoral degree in law from the University of Aberdeen (UK) in 2011. She is Assistant Professor of Global Health at the Hubert Department of Health in the Rollins School of Public Health and director at both the Center for Humanitarian Emergencies at Rollins and the Emory Institute of Human Rights. Her current research projects focus on sexual and reproductive health and rights, specifically the relationship between anti-femicide legislation and perceptions of intimate partner violence in Brazil.

As one of the first faculty to include health and human rights in the public health curriculum, Dr. Evans has charted new interdisciplinary paths uniting public health, human rights and humanitarian response to advance human rights discourse across a range of public health issues. Since 2010, her teaching and training activities have touched over 19,000 learners from 171 countries, and she is responsible for the training of one in every ten employees at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She was also the instructor of the first English language MOOC on Ebola Virus Disease and a Coursera course on Health in Humanitarian Emergencies.

Her public scholarship has appeared in the Pacific Standard, the Atlanta Journal Constitution and The Hill, where she is a regular contributor. She also serves on several editorial boards, is current vice-chair of the Human Rights Forum of the American Public Health Association, and represents Emory on the steering committee of the Interagency Working Group on Reproductive Health in Crisis.

We welcome Dr. Evans to this interim position and look forward to the continued success her leadership will bring.