Biography
Richard Skolnik has more than 40 years of experience in international development and global health.
Richard is also the author of the widely used college textbook Global Health 101, Fourth Edition and the instructor of a massive open online course on Coursera called Essentials of Global Health.
Richard spent 25 years at the World Bank, retiring as the Director for Health and Education for the South Asia Region. While at the World Bank, Richard was deeply involved in education, especially for marginalized children in West Africa and India. He was also extensively involved in work on women and children’s health, communicable disease control, and health systems financing and development, largely in the South Asia region.
After retiring from the World Bank in 2001 Richard was the Director of the Center for Global Health at The George Washington University, where he taught undergraduate global health courses.
Richard then served as the Executive Director of the Harvard PEPFAR program for AIDS treatment in Botswana, Nigeria, and Tanzania. Following that, he was the Vice President for International Programs at the Population Reference Bureau (PRB).
Richard returned to teaching at the George Washington University from 2008 to 2011. He then became a Lecturer at Yale, where he taught introductory and advanced Global Health courses in Yale College and introductory Global Health courses in the Schools of Public Health and the Yale School of Management. Richard recently retired from this position.
While engaged at the George Washington University and Yale, Richard led two evaluations of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative and an evaluation of the Global Leprosy Alliance. He also served on a number of WHO working groups, on the Editorial Advisory Committee for the Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries, Third Edition, and on the Technical Review Panel of the Global Fund. Richard also worked on studies of the financing of HIV/AIDS in Cambodia, India, and Nigeria.
Richard is from Dayton, Ohio, in the US. He received a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree from Yale University and a Master of Public Affairs (MPA) degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University. Richard has lived in the Philippines, Hong Kong and Singapore and worked with a wide range of countries in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, and South Asia. Richard has also learned—to varying degrees—French, Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin, Ilocano, and Tagalog.