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SIPA Faculty
Prabhjot Singh
475 Riverside Drive,
Suite 825
Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs
Phone:
212-851-9603
psingh@ei.columbia.edu
Biography:
Prabhjot Singh is Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs and Director of Systems Design at the Center for Globalization and Sustainable Development (CGSD) at the Earth Institute.
He studies low-resource social systems, with a focus on integrated development and primary health care delivery. He is interested in how organizational design and management systems can be actively adjusted to allow communities and workforces to adapt to complex challenges. His group utilizes technologies like mobile phones and remote sensors to provide reflective-feedback for the management of a community or health of individuals.
Prabhjot Singh has been a leader in the development of Community Health Worker (CHW) systems globally. In 2011, he chaired the “1 Million Community Health Worker Technical Taskforce,” which provides guidance on how low-income countries can deploy, finance and manage large scale health workforce extension systems to address structural gaps in primary health care delivery (i.e. lack of skilled workers in low-resource settings). The management systems deployed for CHWs have relevance to other extension workforces, such as in agriculture and education and are active areas of development.
With the multi-disciplinary CGSD team at the Earth Institute, Prabhjot works with low and middle income governments (Africa, Asia, Latin America, Middle East) on sustainable development planning, with an emphasis on the design and delivery of social systems such as health, education and food. In the process, his group aims to advance practical solutions to social challenges while contributing to systems science by incorporating real-time feedback and active goal-setting into traditional evaluation methodology.
He is also deeply interested in transferring low-resource techniques to deliver social services from low-income settings to costly environments like the United States. His group provides technical guidance for City Health Works!, which is utilizing peer coaches and social network based behavior change to manage non-communicable diseases/chronic conditions, based in East Harlem, Manhattan.
Prabhjot Singh received a BS in Developmental Biology and BA in History from the University of Rochester, a PhD in Neural and Genetic Systems from Rockefeller University, Post-Doctoral fellow in Sustainable Development at Columbia University, an MD from Weill Cornell Medical College with further clinical training in internal medicine at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine. He has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, Earth Institute and the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship.