Photo by Elizar Mercado
Heidi van Rooyen didn’t pursue a degree in public health, but it came knocking on her door all the same.
“In a way, public health found me,” she said.
It found her growing up in South Africa. From a young age, van Rooyen had a sharp awareness of health inequities that resulted from apartheid.
“We were separated in terms of race. That was the big marker that differentiated those who got access to resources, good schooling, good education, and those who didn't,” she said.
Van Rooyen observed that these inequities in South Africa were reflected globally. Countries in the Global North had greater access to resources that led to better health outcomes than countries in the Global South. Amidst these experiences was a growing question: how do we make the world a more fundamentally equitable place?
This question continues to guide van Rooyen in her new role as chair of the Department of Global Health at the University of Washington Schools of Public Health and Medicine. She will lead the department in advancing their work on decolonizing global health, as the department explores how to be a more equitable partner from the Global North working with communities in the Global South.
“How do we make health much more equal, just and diverse, and how does global health begin to address some of these historical ways in which it has been unequal?” van Rooyen said. “It excites me that there is a critical mass in the department who are ready and wanting to do this work together.”
Van Rooyen is an internationally recognized executive leader and social scientist who began her career as a clinical psychologist. But her passion for social justice and making systemic changes influenced her desire to research public health more broadly. She began exploring how social factors shaped HIV risk, vulnerability and health outcomes.
“The field of global health is at a critical junction in its history, where we are simultaneously wrestling with how to address growing health inequities globally and what role individuals and institutions from the Global North should play in charting the path forward,” said Hilary Godwin, dean of the School of Public Health. “It’s hard to imagine a more capable, talented and inspiring individual than Heidi van Rooyen to lead the UW Department of Global Health through these challenges. I am thrilled that she will be joining our leadership team.”
Early in her career, van Rooyen worked at the Centre for Community Based Research, which had a unique focus on incorporating community members into every phase of the research process, from research ideas to implementation. In this way, van Rooyen learned how to answer that question of making research and health more equitable.
At the Centre, van Rooyen worked on a large internationally collaborative study on mental health that was funded by the National Institutes for Health. In many of her collaborative studies with global partners, van Rooyen and her colleagues were keen to communicate to Global North researchers the value, ideas and contributions they brought to shaping the science and challenged the perceptions that they were mere implementers of ideas held by the Global North.
“For me, that has always been fundamental, this insistence on equality, this insistence on valuing all voices,” she said.
Part of the conversation around decolonizing global health is on how foundations and researchers from the Global North come into Global South countries with research agendas that don’t necessarily reflect the health needs of these communities or include their input.
“Heidi van Rooyen is the ideal person to lead our Department of Global Health at this critical moment in time for the field,” said Dr. Tim Dellit, CEO of UW Medicine and the Paul G. Ramsey Endowed Dean of the UW School of Medicine. “Her experience in fostering equitable community partnerships and engagement through the lens of the Global South will help our community navigate the challenging conversations around decolonization and our role in the Global North as we strive to address health inequities globally.”
Van Rooyen has served as the group executive for the Impact Centre since 2020 and has been at the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) in South Africa in a variety of different leadership roles since 2004. The HSRC is the largest social science and humanities statutory research council in Africa whose research aims to address the causes of disease and health and social inequities at multiple levels through a mix of public health, health systems research, implementation science, intervention research and policy research.
Van Rooyen’s research has focused on the intersection of gender, race, sexual orientation and place. Her interest in these intersecting identities and their impact on health began when she was studying HIV. She witnessed how HIV differently impacted people that are poor, Black, or female, and felt that studying the disease in isolation from a person’s identity was limiting.
She led several studies in South Africa that found that the populations who were the most vulnerable and at risk for HIV were poor Black communities and rural communities. HIV care was expensive, required people to take time off work and was accessible to many people in these communities. Her work has focused on how to make care like counseling, testing, and treatment services around HIV more accessible through community-based delivery of services. Their team implemented solutions like mobile caravans that could visit neighborhoods or deliver care directly to patients’ homes.
After years leading international research teams, with the question of equitable community partnership at the core, van Rooyen was excited by the opportunity to continue this work on an academic level as the Department of Global Health chair at the UW. During the interview process, van Rooyen sensed the eagerness of the department’s faculty, staff and students to pursue this work of being equitable global partners.
She is excited by the Department of Global Health’s Partners Advisory Board, which was recently founded to start addressing these questions and engage communities intentionally and purposefully. The board’s goal is to cultivate more equitable, respectful and ethical collaborations with institutional and organizational partners around the world and the U.S.
For the last three decades van Rooyen has led, with distinction, multi-disciplinary teams to deliver impactful bio-behavioral-social research on COVID, HIV and AIDS, health and sexual and reproductive rights through a mix of public health, health systems, implementation science, intervention and policy research.
This will help her lead challenging conversations, including those around decolonizing global health as a U.S. academic institution.
“The word decolonizing always causes such discomfort, right? Or there's always such a reaction or tension around it,” van Rooyen said. “We want to create space in the department where we can grapple with it a little bit more. Part of that work is going to require some honest conversation and reflection about what it means, and what that word elicits and arouses in individuals. And we also need to talk about why this conversation continues to be important in our department, at this time.
Together, van Rooyen and the department will cocreate their agenda for what it means to participate in decolonizing global health and equitable partnership, whether that’s around curriculum, diversity of the department community, or the research questions that are asked.
“If we can begin to create a department that feels like it's forward looking, that is diverse, that is engaged and represents the best of global health, then we become an attractive place for people who want to collaborate and work with us,” van Rooyen said. “That's the goal: to make the UW a place that seems to be asking the right kinds of difficult questions, doing the important work and creating an internal culture and space where everybody feels that they belong, and that we've got this agenda that we all are proud of and working towards.”