post fellow, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative
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Dr. Erin Downey is an emergency preparedness/disaster response professional with 20 years of experience applied to strengthening national healthcare systems and humanitarian protection strategies. Throughout this time, she has advised and operationally responded to governmental, non-governmental and international organizations such as the U.S. Departments of State, Health and Human Services, and USAID and global venues of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) headquarters and its Europe offices. Her professional emphasis is on protecting healthcare workers as they operationalize the protection of access to healthcare during crises, as shown by her recent collaboration with the five global professions of physicians, nurses, pharmacists, dentists and physiotherapists on “What the COVID-19 pandemic exposed: the findings of five global health workforce” where the mental health of the health workforce was emphasized as one of many urgent priorities. Today Dr. Downey represents the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.
She has been a graduate Instructor at Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine for healthcare emergency management, where she also obtained her Doctor of Science in health systems management and applied leadership principles to managing a disaster. Dr. Downey is also an instructor at George Washington Milken Institute of Public Health and is currently completing an LLM in International Humanitarian Law and International Human Rights Law at the University of Frankfurt Oder. These roles contribute to her implementing operational research in health emergency programming and national response capacity-building. She applied this expertise as Vice President of Congresses for the World Association for Disaster Emergency Medicine and in her most recent publication with her WHO colleagues for Elsevier on Modernizing Global Health Security.