Richard M. Fairbanks
School of Public Health

Phone:

(317) 274-3850

Email:

smbabich@iu.edu

Departments:

Environmental Health Science

Health Policy and Management

Dean’s Office

Resume/CV

Biography

Suzanne Babich is a practitioner scholar dedicated to leading and supporting change to improve the public’s health. She is Associate Dean of Global Health and Professor, Health Policy and Management, at the Indiana University Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health in Indianapolis, Indiana USA. There she works across the school and campus and around the world to advance teaching, research and service in global health.

She has a special interest in international, interdisciplinary education and applications of technology for innovative approaches to programming. Her professional interests include health care leadership and the science and practice of people-centered health systems. Her expertise includes cultural proficiency in health services delivery, policy development and advocacy, and domestic and international dietary guidance policy.

She directs the Doctoral Program in Global Health Leadership, a unique professional distance doctoral degree program for mid- to senior-level health practitioners working full-time around the world. An award-winning educator, Dr. Babich has extensive experience in online education and competency based curricula. With support from the Rockefeller Foundation, she and colleagues in Africa are leading an effort to establish a Pan-African doctoral program in health leadership. 

She collaborates closely with colleagues around the world and holds a faculty position in the Department of International Health, Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences, School for Public Health and Primary Care, Maastricht University, The Netherlands. Since 2010, she has held a visiting faculty and program coordinator role at l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Santé Publique (EHESP), the French national school of public health, in Paris and Rennes, France.

She served for nine years on the US-based Council on Accreditation of Health Management Education (CAHME). She is an associate member of the Board of Accreditation, European Agency for Public Health Education Accreditation (APHEA), where she leads accreditation reviews worldwide for online graduate public health programs. She has held leadership roles with the US-based Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health (ASPPH) for more than ten years developing professional doctoral program curricula and pedagogy.

She holds a doctorate in public health from the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the USA. She also holds BS and MS degrees in human nutrition and maintains credentials as a registered dietitian. A professional health writer and former newspaper columnist, she is also (as Suzanne Havala Hobbs) the author of 14 consumer diet and health books and more than 600 newspaper columns and magazine articles translating research into practical recommendations for the public. A champion of public universities, she believes that excellence in local public health requires a global perspective.