Steven Hansch '80, MPH

Graduation Year
1980

Since my happy days in HumBio in the 1970s, I’ve specialized in humanitarian aid, and have worked in dozens of foreign crises, combining public health, medicine, economics, sociology, and other applied sciences I began to learn at Stanford. I have no simple or neat tale to tell. I have written a lot but mostly in the grey literature; I teach a lot, at a variety of universities but merely as adjunct, I serve on a number of boards of nonprofits (which if you’re lucky gets you a cup of coffee), but mostly my work is helping humanitarian aid agencies do their jobs better.

For example: In Haiti, I was helping to organize the strategy for the international organization for migration, then I’ll go to Geneva to help the same organization with their global health policy. Earlier in 2011 I did a project advising Mercy Corps (Portland) on how to reorganize and streamline their relief structures and operations.

Over the longer term, I created and edit a newsletter called “the humanitarian times...” I watch Stanford lectures on iTunes often (several this morning, in fact), and have had some correspondence over the years with my idols Paul Ehrlich and Don Kennedy.

Headshot of Steve Hansch