Course director
Dr Carwyn Hooper
Reader in Global Health Ethics and Law
Head of the Graduate School
Dr Carwyn Hooper has degrees in medicine, philosophy and medical education. He also holds a PhD in law.
Dr Hooper has worked at St George's for over fifteen years and he has a number of different roles at the university. He is the Head of the Graduate School, the Head of Section for Humanities, Ethics, Law and Global Health, and the Course Director for the MSc in Global Health and MA in Medical Ethics, Law and Humanities. He is also the academic co-lead for the MRC funded Doctoral Training Partnership MRC DTP LID between St George's, University of London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Dr Hooper is heavily involved in all aspects of teaching, assessment and curriculum development at St George's. As the Head of the Graduate School he plays a key role in assuring the quality of the postgraduate teaching provision at the university and he is responsible for enabling other academics to create innovative new postgraduate courses. As a Course Director he is responsible for leading a suite of postgraduate courses and as a module lead he is responsible for organising a range of undergraduate and postgraduate modules.
Dr Hooper’s primary research interests are in global health ethics and public health ethics. His PhD focused on personal responsibility for health. He has published on a wide variety of topics including the global regulation of tobacco, the ethical implications of HIV self-testing and the legality of detaining mental health patients.
Deputy course directors
Dr Alison Swartz
Senior Lecturer in Global Health
Dr Alison Swartz joined St Georges, University of London in August 2023. She is a medical anthropologist and one of two deputy course directors for the suite of offerings in Global Health (MSc, MRes, PgCert and PgDip). She leads several modules including the Research Project, Critical Appraisal, and Gender and Sexuality in Global Health modules. Alison also co-leads the core module in Global Health Governance, Ethics and Law.
Alison remains affiliated with her alma mater, the University of Cape Town, as a Senior Lecturer in the Division of Social and Behavioural Sciences in the School of Public Health and Family Medicine. Her research interests include adolescence, sexuality, gender and HIV, as well as qualitative explorations of the experiences of receiving and providing care. She has worked on a range of qualitative evidence syntheses that have contributed to WHO guidelines on task shifting for lay and community health workers, on abortion services and more recently on social accountability in family planning services. While much of her research is focused on South Africa and southern Africa, she has also collaborated on projects elsewhere in Africa, south and south East Asia and here in the UK.
Dr Ayesha Ahmad
Reader in Global Health Humanities
Dr Ayesha Ahmad holds a PhD in medical ethics and works to integrate ethics and the humanities into global health research and pedagogy. Her research expertise is in transcultural psychiatry and cross-cultural mental health. She particularly work in contexts of conflict and humanitarian crisis resulting from disasters including environmental change. Dr Ahmad develops trauma therapeutic interventions using traditional storytelling and has an ongoing research project in Kashmir (India) and Türkiye, in collaboration with Afghanistan, Tunisia, and South Africa, through Shaer Circle.
Dr Ahmad's specialisation is in psychological trauma and the ethical consequences of concepts that are used in mental health. She has developed both undergraduate and postgraduate courses in culture and mental health. In her work, Dr Ahmad critically explores the notion of land trauma, as it is juxtaposed with a medicalised and biomedical paradigm of a temporal understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder.
At St Georges University of London, Dr Ahmad has established a Global Health Humanities Hub to bring together scholars and students using humanities-based methodologies to approach and respond to global health inequities and injustice.
Dr Ahmad also works as an Expert Witness providing academic reports on asylum seeker cases related to war, mental health, and gender-based violence.