Co-Directors

See also Faculty

Ronald Pust, MD, Course Co-Director

Professor, Family and Community Medicine (FCM) and Director, Predoctoral Education Program International Health Curriculum, with a joint appointment in the College of Public Health

Ron Pust, MD, is a family physician who is also board certified in public health/preventive medicine. He sees international health as part of the College of Medicine commitment to underserved people.

Dr. Pust's first four years experience as a physician was with the Centers for Disease Control (1969-73), working for two years in the Navajo Area Indian Health Service, followed by two years in Nigeria after its civil war. On a 2004-05 sabbatical, he was founding chair of Family Medicine at Moi University in Kenya.

His most formative experience as a clinical and public health generalist was at a 120 bed provincial hospital in the highlands of Papua New Guinea from 1973 to 1979. He has returned to Papua New Guinea periodically since 1979, when he joined the University of Arizona faculty. He has developed training courses for health care professionals who plan to work in less developed countries. Rather than seeking shortcuts or substitutes merely for the sake of economy, he seeks to promote intellectually sound but efficient ways of diagnosing and treating problems in underserved settings in the USA and abroad.

Tracy Carroll, PT, MPH, Course Co-Director

Tracy Carroll, PT, MPH is a practicing physical therapist in Tucson, Arizona, and clinical lecturer in FCM. She serves as physical therapist and preceptor at the University of Arizona's Refugee Clinic. Her passion is liberation medicine, linking health with globalization. She works in the Arizona-Mexico border communities promoting health, safety and economic security. Ms. Carroll has a strong commitment to promote social justice within her community and developing countries.

Most of her international work has been in Mexico and Central America.

At the 1995 UN Conference on Women held in Beijing, China, she worked to promote community based health care and microcredit. She has worked with community health clinics and Microcredit organizations in Mexico and Central America, and now with the BanComun microcredit project in Nogales Sonora. It is her hope to evaluate the impact of access to credit with education on health and economic security with the borrowers and their communities.

The following Thomas McKeown quote reflects her approach to international health: "Improvement in health is likely to come, in the future as in the past, from modification of the conditions which lead to disease, rather than from intervention into the mechanisms of disease after it has occurred."