Lori DiPrete Brown focuses her scholarship and practice on global health, particularly the health and well-being of women and children in highly vulnerable situations around the world. She teaches in the Department of Civil Society and Community Studies at the School of Human Ecology and is affiliated with the School of Medicine and Public Health.
She is an Associate Director of the UW-Madison Global Health Institute, where she has been an architect of UW-Madison’s global health education programs and has developed and facilitated internships and service-learning programs in local settings and around the world. DiPrete Brown is the lead author and editor of Foundations for Global Health Practice, a text that articulates a broad vision of global health that goes beyond health care systems, to include topics such as human rights, global mental health, water and sanitation, food systems, climate change and urban health. She is also the founding Director of the campus-wide 4W Women and Well-being Initiative, which has catalyzed a range of innovative programs that address gender-based inequality and injustice.
Before joining UW-Madison, DiPrete Brown collaborated with a range of international organizations to develop quality improvement strategies for health and development programs. She continues this work at UW through the QI Leadership Institute, which has trained over 100 leaders from 17 countries. She has collaborated on QI research, capacity building, policy development and evaluation in Chile, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Cameroon, India, Nepal, and Malawi.
DiPrete Brown holds degrees from Yale College, the Harvard School of Public Health, and the Harvard Divinity School. Her teaching and service inform writing and speaking about global health, gender equity, civil society, and social change. Her novel entitled Caminata: A Journey, is based on her Peace Corps Service in Honduras, where she lived and worked in an orphanage, providing guidance and social services for teenage girls. DiPrete Brown is also an affiliate of the UW-Madison African Studies Program and the Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program. She serves on the advisory boards of the Morgridge Center for Public Service, the UniverCity Alliance and the Latino Earth Partnership.
