Professor Sabina Rashid PhD, MSc

Biography

Professor Sabina Rashid, PhD, is currently Professor, Mushtaque Chowdhury Chair in Health and Poverty (Endowed by the late Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, Founder of BRAC) and was former Dean (2013-2023), at the BRAC James P Grant School of Public Health, BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. She joined the School in 2004. She is a Medical Anthropologist (BA, Masters, PhD) from the Australian National University and joined the school in 2004. Her research challenges dominant biomedical paradigms by foregrounding the lived experiences and structural determinants of health that shape family life in the Global South. Over the last two decades, Rashid has developed a robust ethnographic and qualitative research portfolio that unpacks how gender, poverty, urban precarity, and social exclusion intersect to affect the health and well-being of families, particularly those living in slum settlements, and among adolescent populations in Bangladesh. She places particular emphasis on the intersections of gender, health, and poverty, examining how structural and intersectional factors influence health outcomes among these populations. Before her association with the School, she worked at the research and evaluation division (RED) at BRAC, the health unit at UNICEF, Bangladesh, and Grameen Trust, a sister organization of Grameen Bank. Professor Rashid has approximately 100 + publications (i.e., peer-reviewed articles, international book chapters and monographs (3830 + citations; h-index:31). She has published three books on gender and health – from University Press Limited, Routledge, UK and Springer Publishers.

Professor Rashid is also engaged in teaching and training. In 2008, she founded the Centre of Excellence for Gender, Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights and co-established the Centre of Excellence for Urban Equity and Health in 2013. Both centres prioritize evidence-based approaches to influence policies and programs, sharing evidence from the Global South on national, regional, and global platforms to ensure approaches remain contextually relevant and suitable for diverse settings. She is dedicated to fostering meaningful institutional partnerships between the North and South for intellectual engagement, knowledge, and capacity sharing among academics, researchers, and practitioners nationally, regionally, and globally.

Professor Rashid serves on several global boards, contributing to shaping thought leadership, fostering strategic thinking, and providing critical insights into research and policy endeavours; including as Co-Chair, of ADLAB (Adolescent Health Learning, Action, and Benchmarking) launched by the Global Financing Facility (GFF) and the World Bank’s Development Economics Research Group, as a Commissioner on the CHH-Lancet Commission on Health, Conflict and Forced Displacement. In 2023, she was invited to be a Technical Advisory Group (TAG) member for the Institute for Global Health and Development, Aga Khan University, and the SickKids Centre for Global Child Health, Toronto for their multiple research projects on women, gender, health and climate affected populations. In early 2024, she was invited to be a Board Member of the International Scientific Advisory Board (ISAB) for Behavioural Research UK (BR-UK). In April 2024, she was selected as a Research Advisory Group (RAG) Member of Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), UK. Since 2009, she has been serving as a working group member of a National civil society group – Bangladesh Health Watch, a national citizen’s health watch group that was established in 2006 to monitor the health and rights of disadvantaged populations.

Her leadership has been featured in World Health Organisation Bulletin, Geneva in 2019 (https://cutt.ly /93pJB0l) and in (2022) in the edited collection, Women and Global Health Leadership, Springer, Cham. https://cutt.ly/c3p6aII, and was featured in Lancet Perspectives Profile, Volume 405, Issue 10472, p 19, January 04, 2025, Sabina Faiz Rashid: building social justice in public health, by Arathi Prasad.