How To Choose a Career In Development and Save Lives

This week Dr. Elvira will speak with author and public health expert, Dr. Barry Karlin. They will talk about his new book, Choosing A Career In Development: My Five Decades In International Public Health. They will discuss the joys and challenges of working overseas, and within the field public health. They will also talk about careers in the field and how one might begin a career in global health or successfully change their current career path.

After receiving a B.S. in environmental health at UCLA in 1956 and a Masters in Public Health from Berkeley in 1959, Barry Karlin was recruited by the U.S. Agency for International Development to serve as an Environmental Health Advisor in rural Thailand, where he worked on Thailand’s Village Health and Sanitation Project. In 1966, he joined the staff of the Population Council of New York and was assigned to Pakistan as a family-planning advisor to its government. Three years later, Dr. Karlin began his doctorate of public health studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, which was followed by serving as the Chief of Family Planning Education for the newly formed National Center for Family Planning Services under the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. He later headed the Health Education Section at the American Public Health Association in Washington, D.C.

Following a year of service in Holland as a researcher with the International Reference Centre for Water and Sanitation, he was recruited by the World Health Organization to serve as a Health Education Advisor to the Government of Papua New Guinea where he addressed a large variety of health issues, including the growing threat of HIV/AIDS. Since then, Dr. Karlin has fulfilled countless short-term assignments throughout the world.

Dr. Karlin now lives in Boulder, Colorado where he serves as an assistant adjunct professor at the University of Colorado.