Sofia Gruskin

Sofia Gruskin directs the USC Institute on Inequalities in Global Health (IIGH). She is Professor of Preventive Medicine and Chief of the Disease Prevention, Policy and Global Health Division at the Keck School of Medicine, Professor of Law and Preventive Medicine at the Gould School of Law, and an affiliate faculty member with the Spatial Sciences Institute at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Within USC, she is highly engaged in university service, including serving as a member of the USC Academic Senate Executive Board, and primary convener of the USC Law & Global Health Collaboration.

Gruskin currently sits on numerous international boards and committees including the PEPFAR Scientific Advisory Board, the Lancet Commission on Gender and Global Health, the IUSSP Steering Committee to Strengthen Civil Registration and Vital Statistics Systems, and the Lancet Commission on Health and Human Rights. She is co-coordinator of the Rights-Oriented Research and Education Network for Sexual and Reproductive Health, an international network of sexual and reproductive health and rights researchers and advocates from the Global South and the Global North. Professor Gruskin has published extensively, including several books, training manuals and edited journal volumes, and more than 200 articles and chapters covering a wide range of topics. She is an associate editor for Global Public Health, on the editorial advisory board for Revue Internationale des Études du Développement, a trustee of Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters, and was an associate editor of the American Journal of Public Health and editor in chief for Health and Human Rights both for over a decade.

A pioneer in bringing together multi-disciplinary approaches to global health, Gruskin’s work, which ranges from global policy to the grassroots level, has been instrumental in developing the conceptual, methodological and empirical links between health and human rights, with a focus on HIV/AIDS, sexual and reproductive health, child and adolescent health, gender-based violence, non-communicable disease and health systems.

Current research partners include the LA Mayor Eric Garcetti’s Office of International Affairs, the United Nations Development Programme, the World Health Organization, Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, Open Society Foundations, Global Action for Trans Equality, and local organizations and universities in Bangladesh, Brazil, Kenya, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Africa and Vietnam.

In recent years, Gruskin served on the board of directors for the Guttmacher Institute, the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on the Outcome and Impact Evaluation of Global HIV/AIDS Programs Implemented under the Lantos/Hyde Act of 2008, the UN Technical Advisory Group for the High-Level Working Group on the Health and Human Rights of Women, Children and Adolescents, the Technical Advisory Group of the UN Global Commission on HIV and the Law, the UNAIDS Reference Group on HIV and Human Rights, the Global Advisory Board on Sexual Health and Wellbeing, and the USC Senate Executive Board. Gruskin was with Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health for many years; director of the Program on International Health and Human Rights and associate professor in the department of Global Health and Population; and co-founder and co-director of the Interdepartmental Program on Women, Gender and Health.